My favorite one is when they’re like “people act according to incentives” because they half-remember something they watched about the Freakonomics guy paying his toddler to pee on the toilet.
And it’s like, what the fuck do you think socialism is? We’re trying to change the incentive structures to pull different behaviors out of people, in part because we recognize that capitalism incentivizes the worst, most anti social behaviors in almost every single interaction.
“Oh but Marx didn’t consider human nature” Marx assumes that humans aren’t saints and mostly act logically based on what’s in front of them. Modern economists assume that humans have perfect information about the costs and consequences of everything they do, make decisions like cold calculating robots, but also never plan more than one quarter into the future and never coordinate across large groups except to make more money. One of these is a closer match to real human behavior than the other.
My favorite one is when they’re like “people act according to incentives” because they half-remember something they watched about the Freakonomics guy paying his toddler to pee on the toilet.
And it’s like, what the fuck do you think socialism is? We’re trying to change the incentive structures to pull different behaviors out of people, in part because we recognize that capitalism incentivizes the worst, most anti social behaviors in almost every single interaction.
“Oh but Marx didn’t consider human nature” Marx assumes that humans aren’t saints and mostly act logically based on what’s in front of them. Modern economists assume that humans have perfect information about the costs and consequences of everything they do, make decisions like cold calculating robots, but also never plan more than one quarter into the future and never coordinate across large groups except to make more money. One of these is a closer match to real human behavior than the other.