When we talk about economics, we generally are trying to solve the problem of getting people to feed themselves. This was a problem that didn’t come about until people started killing themselves for control of resources. We realized that these could be allocated more fairly. So we devised systems… governments… to dole out the resources to people. But governments were obviously not foolproof. Questions remained. Who would submit to governments? Why give our stuff to them? Who gets the resources and why?

People got together and came up with the solution and killed those who didn’t agree, or left them outside to starve and die: we’ll all submit to a system because it’s better than the alternative, or I’ll join your tribe because I don’t want to end up on a stick. Obviously, some made out like bandits from this transaction, namely the lazy, and some got gipped (the agressive hunters or prodigy farmers, maybe). Humans pick up on stuff like this pretty easily for some reason: the same reason you can’t get over your roommates lack of dishwashing capacity. We were kinda built for it. Yet instead of kicking out the lazy, we decided to make more efficient work of them. You “produce”, I’ll “produce” and we’ll get together and trade.

This, I think, was the first step down a long series of mistakes, that has nothing to do with the idea itself.

Systems, in general, are pretty well defined. We have bikes that work in fairly predictable ways, pipes that flow, and governments with their rules and laws that all spin around fairly predictably. Given a certain input: leg-power, water, or opinions, the output is similary well-defined. Except when it’s not. This is especially true where humans are involved. Our capacity for understanding purely physical systems if unparalleled. With a certain vector force on a pedal, the weight and aerodynamic signature of the rider, etc, I can tell you where the bike will be in 10 seconds. Wow.

Now I give you a means for people to send messages to one another. Wait ten years. Did you predict the internet? Darn.

The problem with human systems are their emergent properties, and the problem with these properties is that they are almost unpredictable. The reasoning is pretty simple. If we want to define the bike’s motion, we can examine the bike in space (cute), the bike in a physics world (fun), the bike in the “real world”, and the bike in a crowded city. Each step progressively increases the scope of potential side effects, and each step reduces our fundamental understanding of the outcomes of the system. We isolate these side effects by nullifying them, but this is rarely accurate in bigger systems. When I describe the gear of a bike are you thinking bike lanes and car accidents? Possibly. How about Bob Dylan’s 1966 bike accident? Even the question of whether or not it was staged adds to the ambiguous nature of making far-out predictions. A problem.

Yet we are endlessly enamored with this idea of simplicity, with categorization and reductions. Our minds are finite and whether or not our world is truly so is irrelevant because we shall make it so, however wrong we are. We must, they say. Economics is the height of our hubris. It aims to make humans “productive” through incentive for work. But what about the side effects? Can we even consider them? The problem with systems that involve humans is that they are by very nature unpredictable. Approximatable, but unpredictable. The problem with systems that govern humans is that they go beyond this and effect our understanding of them. Capitalism, without getting too boring, is a proper example. In its infancy, it served a very important role: governing the production and distribution of goods and services. As it matured, certain emergent properties began to make themselves visible. What people in general want will be produced, and what people want can be controlled by marketing. Marketing is fueled by consumption, sales, which inherently requires production. This is a feedback loop. The empirical data shows that people, over time, have more and are unhappier. So what? This is a good thing. The idea assembled in one, grabbbed a million heads to convince you of its efficacy. You adopted your master in a transaction you still technically control.

In the beginning, people submitted to governments because it was a good idea. They adopted economic systems to get around problems, to provide for more people. Was it a good decision? The population of the world is exploding, but may settle. The environment is getting worse, but things are looking “green”. People are unhappier, but we’re able to provide for more of their basic needs. All I will say is that the essential principle that was missing from the initial plan was that of contradiction and reevaluation.

We as people don’t need to follow a straight line, nor do we need to make the same decisions (or even cohesive ones) to keep from fracturing our identities. As time passes and more data is added, it becomes necessary to reevalute our initial decisions, to make new ones, and possibly to reroute. The mistakes we make are primarily forcing ourselves into situations that rob ourselves of the power to change our minds, or kill the will to create new opinions. The current systems are faulty because they included provisions that changed our minds about what life was, right or wrong. People are starving not because we lack the right policy, leadership, or control, but because we lack the power to be fluid with our intentions and dynamic in thought. Ideas, then, are not the enemy. People are not the enemy. The villain is the imaginary chains that bind the two.

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