this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
456 points (96.5% liked)
Curated Tumblr
4269 readers
39 users here now
For preserving the least toxic and most culturally relevant Tumblr heritage posts.
The best transcribed post each week will be pinned and receive a random bitmap of a trophy superimposed with the author's username and a personalized message. Here are some OCR tools to assist you in your endeavors:
-
FOSS Android Recs per u/[email protected]: 1 , 2
Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And I suspect you might even suggest the only real aspect of economics boils down to supply vs demand regardless of what the thing in supply or demand is?
Definitely not. The rules behind supply and demand hinge on some extremely flimsy assumptions, namely:
For things like food, housing, medicine, etc. People don't get the luxury of voting with their wallets, and this is why the free market cannot allocate resources effectively.
Just because I went to school for economics does not mean I am a free market capitalist. I'm definitely not.
Totally agree
This is actually pretty well deacrived by what's called the price elasticity of demand in standard neoclassical models. For things like housing one might say that the demand is very inellastic: A change in price does not affect the quatity demanded.
Yes exactly. This is why I find it funny when they use two different, yet contradictory reasons to justify the sin tax:
When really they're primarily taxing the things poor people are addicted to.
Idk, I'm generalizing, I'm just kind of pointing out how a lot of the supports capitalism rests on are weird little opaque excuses to convince the masses that exploitation is what's best for us
So many economists are stuck in a box of what our society has been, they can't think past our current rules and regulations to what could be, because they think that the rules and trends they learn in school are the only possibility, or that profit must be king.
Ah ok, I see the flaw in my thinking.
Things that are always in demand don't drive a price solely based on supply, and since people don't act in their own best interest the actual demand of something can't be a useful way to determine the value of a thing.
So that sort of says to me that with a truly free market economy, it would be just as impossible to model future prices because of the inherent unpredictability of humans.