Failure of Economics as a Science

Economics takes a wrong investigative direction. It misses the point by measuring results of ever changing policy of world's elites instead of looking at the real problem of dividing power and resources between 7 billion individual mammals.



Perhaps the most ridiculous and rather insulting concept that has risen in the modern post-religious world is one of "laws of economics". In the future, people will look back with amazement that a concept belonging in the same category of fiction as "divine right", "natural law", or "inalienable right" has managed to survive for as long as it did. Of course just like these previous illusions, this silly study of man made artificial constructs (and the resulting records and snapshots in time of these faith based constructs that are always in flux) is only "relevant" because the constructs are backed by guns, bomber planes, and thermonuclear rockets. The "experts" in these matters only hold power in so far that the giant monopoly game that is 21st century international capitalism is "strictly" adhered to by most of the global force centers (monopolies on violence that are strong states).

This "strict" adherence (to an international elite consensus on how to allocate material resources acquired through force) is not logically possible since the strong individuals who make the rules always modify and change them at will. Thus, even the concept of world's elites playing by their own rules is an impossible fiction since strict adherence is a joke. Yet, for some reason billions of people think that the experts in economics (a playground sandbox that makes an even poorer job trying to be a "real" science than sociology does) have more validity than experts on feudal slave economics hundreds of years ago.

Yes, there were always people who spent years studying symptoms of arbitrary decisions made by elites. They studied serfdom and how the papal state theocracy allocates resources. They studied dynamics of slave trade. When decades of an individual human are spent memorizing and recording the effects of social policy, the human is tempted to make the results of the study into universal eternal law. Thus we have seen academics defending for centuries theocratic/feudal/absolute monarchist slavery as an efficient natural way of allocating materials and human beings. Notice how humans are considered "resources" now just as they were in ancient Egypt.

Even today, it is tempting to think that all the world's conflicts and problems can be boiled down to disagreements on how to allocate material "scarce" resources. It is tempting to side with elites and use supercomputers and fancy graphs to find ever better more efficient way to allocate commodities and human labor. However, human beings and natural resources are not just sitting there in a petri dish to be studied and efficiently allocated. Human beings are actively trying to expand their personal power by creating new rules of the game to trick others into playing by the new rules. The study of economics is the study of an inflatable tent placed on ever shifting sand dunes. All the world's social problems and conflicts occur due to eternal and fluid power struggles between numerous mammals trying to get an edge over other mammals any way they can. We see the strong societies make rules and forcing weak societies to play by them while not following the rules themselves. This indicates that when world's elites get cornered by the rules of their own making, they will attempt to change or get rid of the game altogether.

Economics, besides not being even close to a real science like chemistry (although of course chemistry also studies patterns in shifting sand dunes and crude shapes produced by energy flow), doesn't even focus in the right direction. Only study of power dynamics between individuals combined with biology can begin to provide ideas on what arrangement can give us desired social results.

Here's a visual illustration of the difficulties we're facing. Right now all the world's people are like little spheres of power in a closed container (lets visualize it as cylindrical container for clarity). These spheres shrink and expand based on how much power an individual attains in society due to external and internal variables. The larger the sphere is, the more it rises to the top while the smaller ones sink to the bottom. Of course while the bottom of the container is full of billions of tiny spheres (those mammals making less than a dollar a day) the surface of the pile has a few thousand large spheres rubbing against each other (mammals that are economic, military, and political elites). Most individuals are biologically predisposed to try to become master over the entire world (subconsciously and consciously) by increasing personal power in all directions since it increases their chances of survival and reproduction. Most would not mind being in charge of everything, being the only sphere on the surface of the pile plugging the cylinder and preventing any from even sharing the same level as itself.

It becomes evident that the real question to resolve is one of scarcity of power. The task of economics (looking at world's elites playing monopoly table game with real human lives and constantly making rules up as they go along) to predict anything having to do with reality is a futile and silly one. People should drive these economists (modern day charlatans, useless snake oil salesmen, and king's courtiers) out of town and look towards scientists, doctors, and psychologists for solutions on how to divide power amongst humanity.

usury never changes

Throughout history, in most major civilization and religions, usury was frowned upon and often prohibited. Money changing artists and parasitic middlemen never contributed anything useful. Over thousands of years humans learned the hard way over and over again to prohibit "interest". The trade behind new world colonial expansion could never begin to be compared in "realness" to today's financial sector. The ancient world built awe inspiring mass infrastructure without links of middlemen and their material overhead. The world of the future will do so again. Now that money stopped being tangible rare items like gold and became just a fiction perpetuated by cultural inertia and charlatan salesmen, new prohibitions are needed on behavior that collapses civilization.

Human Psychological Motivation as Will to Power?

Exploring the world where the primary motivation is desire to modify one's environment rather than the motivation to pursue pleasure. 



Part 1: An attempt to finally make practical use of Nietzsche in day to day life




Imagine if the greatest human motivation was not to move towards the ambiguous elusive goal of greater happiness, pleasure, physiological equilibrium, or contentness. How would the way we look at the world and ourselves change?

The building assumption in this series is that the most important motivation for a human being is to endlessly expand personal influence over conscious reality. This simple concept, most elegantly defended and argued by Nietzsche, has a surprisingly large ripple effect on day to day matters if it is taken seriously and if pursuit of happiness is subordinated to it. This is because most of the world's cultures have succumbed to the idea that all our resources and values should be geared towards reducing the frequency of unpleasant events happening to us on social and individual level. This notion is so ingrained in us that it almost seems absurd that something other than pain avoidance principle drives our bodies subconsciously. Many of popular economic and political systems are designed with the notion that human beings are but utility calculators that need a proper utility distribution arrangement. Pleasure and pain are just too obvious and immediate and have been so for thousands of years. However, pain avoidance does not sufficiently explain a large part of human social behavior as well as weakness avoidance does.

This is not some masochistic attempt to argue for embracing suffering but about re-prioritizing pleasure to secondary supporting role in pursuit of power so as to explore the world that results in a practical way. Nietzsche trailblazed in terms of revealing that historical events, notable celebrities, and social movements all thrive for power in creative ways such as sublimation. He never left any practical suggestions on how to live in a world where people just differ in their particular means of increasing strength. Recently, there has been some major understanding among researchers (such as those driving the field of positive psychology) that feeling of powerlessness is a major social as well as an individual trouble that needs to be addressed.

Human interactions begin to make a lot more sense and seem less irrational when we look at every human agent as being driven to greater and greater influence over his or her environment. Patterns of strategic behaviors emerge that are more enduring and predictable than ones emerging in quest of a new pleasure fix. This is due to the key difference between the two motivators.

The moment of happiness, once had, can't really be increased but only repeated whereas influence can be increased practically infinitely. Power builds on itself and a self reinforcing motivating loop is created pushing a person toward greater heights. Unlike pleasure, there isn't a relative ceiling (a meth addict can only experience so much in a moment of a high and an orgasm cannot be exponentially intensified). Once a person accumulates more influence, it doesn't paralyze but instinctively encourages the use of said influence for gain of more. Influence is thus constructive, creative, and the feel for it is internalized within a person long enough to lead to constant augmentation of the self.

A ready objection may await a reader's lips, "obviously some power is important to function but isn't it just one of the means towards happiness and its repetition?"

This question makes power just a tool towards some end which does not maintain primacy over the end regardless of the tool's importance. The objection has more weight than possible others in that it tries to eliminate debate on power being an alternate destination by making it one of the roads towards the only destination that matters (happiness). One motivation becomes consumed and absorbed by another. The ground is also set to prepare a counter-objection (in defense of power) for a tug of war.

The counter objection goes as follows: just like the joy of eating compels human bodies to survive and just like the joy of sex compels them to reproduce, the happiness achieved from power compels us to seek more power. The happiness we think we seek is just a possible side effect reaffirming our quest for influence. Just like survival and reproduction are more important physiologically than any fleeting joy, power is equally necessary especially considering it increases the chances of the two.

The tug of war of motivations created here is of course the chicken or the egg problem. We could argue endlessly which came first or if the feel of having power is pleasurable (making the two motivations one and the same or making power the subcategory of happiness).

Ultimately, the practical guide using the more correct motivational system would better predict, break down, and explain human interaction while taking into account the other motivation popping its head here and there.

Unlike other serious motivations such as pursuit of wealth (which is culturally agreed to aid in acquisition of happiness rather than being an end in itself), the feeling of influence over the world is internalized by a person a lot more than the feeling of being wealthy. Another lesser difference is that power is a lot more contextual than pleasure and thus can be more readily passed between individuals, lost, and gained. One needs others a lot more to create an interplay of resistance and competing influences.

Click to enlarge one mating aiding scheme

In later parts we'll explore how power flows among individuals and what we can do in our daily lives to feel more physiologically wholesome. There is no need to rehash or summarize Nietzsche as there are plenty of people who have done so marvelously. The time to bridge the abstract and the practical cannot come soon enough. Nietzschean thought (contrary to popular perception) offers the most tangible and practical day to day applications.


There is also the consideration to tackle the culturally ingrained negative perception of such a quest. Too much mud has been thrown on the notion of raising an individual's influence by institutions that rely on different motivational notions to maintain their own influence (such as organized clergy). Pursuit of shaping the world based on one's thoughts is natural, healthy, and personally inescapable and shared by all the people in the world regardless of their sociopolitical structures. Majority of the time desire for influence results in net benefit for society and contributes to its growth rather than resulting in use of force (robbery or violence on micro or marco scale). On the whole, individuals channel their power expanding energies safely into wealth generation, physiological improvement, the arts, etc.

In the modern world, acquisition of money is a much quicker and most socially acceptable way towards achievement of power and ways have been developed to accommodate it (ideological notions of enlightened self interest, free market economics, etc.). Although monetary practices, (especially as practiced by United States and England) have caused enormous amount of suffering internationally, the value of power on an individual level is not an automatic door to anarchy, fascism, or license to rudeness and cruelty. It is rather acceptance of ourselves and our motivations so we become more informed about how power flows in the world, become more efficient as people, and cut flows of power to those aspects of the world that unnecessarily weaken us in day to day life. The more influence an organism gets, the more alive and healthy it is.

to be continued..