The economy is just increasingly fake or rewarding foolish scummy behaviour instead of honest cooperative work. People coasted for 10+ years now on "passive income" from printed money along with almost no enforcement action against scams. That gave rise to a chain reaction of people trying to scam each other in a general revenge. Take for example a big slice of the economy - real estate. Honest real estate agents who…
I commented elsewhere but I studied Econ in college because it was a particular interest of mine. I hated it. I also wanted to understand it, so that I could know why it rubbed me the wrong way and live intentionally to push against it. There was this moment when I was in a grad course and the professor was talking about self-optimizing markets. That's when it hit me. I literally stood up in the class, interrupted ev…
The idea of optimization is that everyone gets the best possible set.
E.g. Alice prefers tomatoes, Bob prefers mangos. Thus, Alice ends up with 100% of the tomatoes, Bob with 0%.
Unfortunately it's mostly the externalities and irrationality / wrong assumptions that fail us.
An economy is not optimal (or pareto efficient) iff people are disproportionally sick, sad and angry because of economical reasons (and don't trade this sickness, sadness and angriness for something that gives them more utility).