Paul Krugman highlights one of his old Slate pieces taking on Supply-Side economics. Its interesting overall, but there is a particular point I want to pick up on. Krugman says
Biologist Richard Dawkins has argued famously that ideas spread from mind to mind much as viruses spread from host to host. It’s an exhilaratingly cynical view, because it suggests that to succeed, an idea need not be true or even useful, as long as it has what it takes to propagate itself. (A religious faith that disposes its believers to become martyrs may be quite false, and lethal to its adherents, yet persist if each martyr inspires others.)
Ironically perhaps, I read this and said out loud: wait, what’s the other view? So deeply infected am I with the notion that evolution drives everything in the living world that it seems hard to frame the world as anything else. Of course, those things most adapted to persist, persist. There is no other criterion on which persistence could be based.
Given that after this long, the world is made up only of persistent things we should expect this to underlie our entire reality.
Again, ironically though, this should make us – or at least me – pause and ponder whether evolutionary explanations really are true or just highly infectious.
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Sunday ~ September 4th, 2011 at 2:23 pm
Curt Doolittle
I know you and Paul won’t grasp this but:
1) Memes spread because they have UTILITY to the carrier.
2) The American public has decided that monetary manipulation has external causes that they no longer are willing to pay for, and consequently they are more willing to pay economic difficulty than they are expansion of the political sphere.
3) Status signals are the human economy. Not money. This is patently obvious from watching human behavior.
4) Cultural institutions that encourage us to forgo opportunities are the most expensive institutions to build. People know this.
The assumption that you and Krugman are making is dependent upon the ability of monetary policy either a) to produce ALL human ends or b) to produce the only useful human end.
BOTH OF THESE ASSUMPTIONS ARE DEMONSTRABLY FALSE.
This is why you fail.
Small homogenous nation states produce uniform and utilitarian status signals. Empires do not. If you attempt to destroy money and prices people will create a black market consisting of some form of money and prices, or to overthrow their oppressors. If you attempt to destroy a status economy people will develop a black market in status, or to overthrow their oppressors.
The American people have decided. They are not articulate. But they have decided. THey may use narratives, myths, allegories, and other memes that have UTILITY in achieving their ends. But they are achieving their desired ends.
Starving the beast works. It’s working.
Sunday ~ September 4th, 2011 at 2:25 pm
Curt Doolittle
In case it isn’t’ obvious, status cues are a necessary and ineradicable property of human pedagogy and epistemology. We are imitators. Status is the only way to know what to imitate, because it is the only way to know what is useful.
Sunday ~ September 4th, 2011 at 3:44 pm
Effem
Curt,
Very interesting thoughts. I have long thought that part of the problem with economics is that it fails to see that economic progress is simply a proxy for happiness (perhaps not even a very good proxy). People desire a lot more than simply the largest economic pie. Bank bailouts are a great example – people seem (in aggregate) to be willing to sacrifice some economic pain to achieve some level of “fairness.” Economists can’t understand that.
My other big problem with economics (which also plays into the evolution theme a bit) is that it views the market as static. Markets adapt to incorporate leading economic thought and likely remedies. Once a market has fully adapted to a line of economic thinking, the solutions may in fact become problems.
Sunday ~ September 4th, 2011 at 4:50 pm
Lord
Persistent to the extent evolution doesn’t occur? The environment doesn’t persist and mutation occurs however well adapted. Little is so persistent there is no room for improvement even if most is not an improvement, yet high persistence in a stable environment can be disastrous in a changing one.
Sunday ~ September 4th, 2011 at 5:15 pm
bdbd
Weird comments indeed. This is weird but satisfying: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/science/23parasite.html
Friday ~ October 7th, 2011 at 1:29 am
Zac
Haha, such sillyness! Our world is not made up of persistent things. Greater than 99% percent of all species that have ever existed on Earth are extinct. Are we to say that while some temporal subset of those species were extant on the globe (during their respective time period) that they were persistent? No, clearly they were transient. The earth is populated with a succession of transients: imperfect replicas that squeezed through the hecatombs of natural selection that killed their progenitors from the previous generation, which, in turn were imperfect facsimiles of the previous generation, and so on ad infinitum. Your biological evolution as metaphor for propagation of ideas is specious because you have no analog to fitness in the face of selective pressure, the driving mechanism for evolution. A better analog from an evolutionary viewpoint is Harvey-Weinberg equilibrium. Read the Wikipedia page and you’ll likely draw the parallel.