( ... tālāk ... )Social psychologists are mostly "situationists": they claim that a lot of what people do is best explained not by traits of character, but by systematic human tendencies to respond to features of their situations that nobody previously thought to be crucial at all. They think that someone who is, say, reliably honest in one kind of situation will often be reliably dishonest in another. They'd be unsurprised, for example, that Oskar Schindler was mercenary, arrogant, hypocritical, calculating, and vain sometimes … but not always; and that his courage and compassion could be elicited in some contexts but not in others.
We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. The economy in which we operate is not a natural system, but a set of rules developed in the Late Middle Ages in order to prevent the unchecked rise of a merchant class that was creating and exchanging value with impunity. This was what we might today call a peer-to-peer economy, and did not depend on central employers or even central currency. Feudal lords, early kings, and the aristocracy were not participating in this wealth creation. Their families hadn't created value in centuries, and they needed a mechanism through which to maintain their own stature in the face of a rising middle class. The two ideas they came up with are still with us today in essentially the same form, and have become so embedded in commerce that we mistake them for pre-existing laws of economic activity. The first innovation was to centralize currency. What better way for the already rich to maintain their wealth than to make money scarce? Monarchs forcibly made abundant local currencies illegal, and required people to exchange value through artificially scarce central currencies, instead. Not only was centrally issued money easier to tax, but it gave central banks an easy way to extract value through debasement (removing gold content). Prosperity on the periphery quickly diminished as value was drawn toward the center. Within a few decades of the establishment of central currency in France came local poverty, an end to subsistence farming, and the plague. (..) It doesn't take a genius or a scientist to understand how the rules of the economic game as it is currently played reflect neither human values nor the laws of physics. The market cannot expand infinitely like the redshifts in Hubble's universe. If science can take on God, it should not fear the market. Both are, after all, creations of man. (..) We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. We must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems. The scientific tradition exposed the unpopular astronomical fact that the earth was not at the center of the universe. This stance challenged the social order, and its proponents were met with less than a welcoming reception. Today, science has a similar opportunity: to expose the fallacies underlying our economic model instead of producing short-term strategies for mitigating the effects of inventions and discoveries that threaten this inherited market hallucination.
— Douglas Rushkoff, Economics Is Not a Natural Science
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