Comment by roenxi
2 months ago
Take a wider view - the people with economic power are generally the people who use it for economically sensible things. Someone who spends irrationally is going to end up with no money. This is a similar process to natural selection - because the unviable strategies are removed, everything that is around is using a viable strategy. This woman was forcing people with unviable financial beliefs (that led to them being easily scammed) to give up their ability to exert economic pressure. In that sense, the same processes as natural selection are at play and we can call it the same thing.
Although I don't buy the logic in a lot of edge cases, it is somewhat necessary that these tactics are legal. Diverting resources to people who waste them is ruinous.
No, the resources diverted to people with "unviable financial beliefs" were done so in a proper market-efficient way, and would have been spent in perfectly ordinary ways no different from the average person of modest means, if it weren't for the scams.
Diverting people's resources to unproductive, antisocial scammers based on arbitrary educational criteria is the only "ruinous" thing in this picture. They are the economic inefficiency.
Well sure but you could make similar complaints about a bacterial infection killing a human. It is still natural selection even if it is arbitrary, pointless or destructive.
> and would have been spent in perfectly ordinary ways no different from the average person of modest means, if it weren't for the scams.
That is a pretty big leap.
There are plenty of ways, plenty of “unviable financial beliefs”, that can lead one to unwisely fritter away their resources without being exploited by a scammer.
You are basically asserting that most people who get scammed are otherwise Rational Agents who would invest their capital wisely, if not for the scammers deceiving them.
I would argue that, on the contrary, this set of people is very small.
Think of how many stories there are of people pursuing “investments”, or just directing their resources, into flat-out bullshit.
To pick some examples off the top of my head:
How much time, money, thought, effort (e.g. capital) has been wasted by people pursuing the Flat Earth theory? I would guess that there aren’t very many scammers involved in the Flat Earth movement. Most of the people involved are crackpot true believers.
As opposed to, say, homeopathy. Which certainly has a not-insignificant number of exploiters/scammers, people who know that it is bullshit but gladly exploit the uneducated.
Both of these movements involve a significant number of “uneducated” people spending their resources on a fantasy.
But, most of the resources poured into the Flat Earth movement are pure waste, with very little benefit whatsoever to the “Body Economic”. There are not very many “trickle down” benefits from the resources being spent.
When the “uneducated” people give their resources to a scammer, it is usually ending up in the hands of someone who is at least somewhat economically rational. And those resources will be spent in more rational ways.
Even if the scammer buys a bunch of gold chains and sports cars that they don’t really use, those resources are “participating” in the economy in a way that the wasted investments that don’t involve a scammer are not.
I’m not on the scammers’ side. I’m not saying they are good people. But it is not clear that “they are the economic inefficiency”.
> But, most of the resources poured into the Flat Earth movement are pure waste, with very little benefit whatsoever to the “Body Economic”. There are not very many “trickle down” benefits from the resources being spent.
> Even if the scammer buys a bunch of gold chains and sports cars that they don’t really use, those resources are “participating” in the economy in a way that the wasted investments that don’t involve a scammer are not.
Are you saying that people in the first case are taking their money and burning it? Because if not I don’t see how you could make that statement without more research - if the flat earthers are printing books, selling videos, hosting conferences, going on “fact finding” missions, etc. then they’re generating economic value as well. Much less of it in absolute terms given the relative population sizes but you can’t just assume everyone is Scrooge McDuck sitting on a huge pile of money.