Open to first page of econ 101 textbook

Do people unironically believe this shit?

Yes. The laws of physics do not apply to economics, its magic.

Requesting its magic i aint gotta explain shit economist meme.

In what sense does OP violate the laws of physics?

Your brain has limited space and thus cannot have unlimited desire. There is also limited time, so even if one has unlimited desire, one cannot statisfy desires at infinite speed.

At some point, you plateau in your desire-statisfying-speed curve, physically unable to desire your desires faster, even if the material conditions would allow for it.

What if I desire something, but gain no lasting pleasure, making me seek more to consume?

Then point 2 still stands. You can't consume at infinite speed.

While we're obviously temporally limited in what we can consume, it's hardly an insight unique to economics that humans find it impossible to find permanent satisfaction. cf. the entirety of the field of psychoanalysis.

...

Economists are literally people who are too stupid to be pure mathematicians, computer scientists, or theoretical physicists, but smart enough to realize that they can make a lot of money telling the ruling class what it likes to hear while still feeling like they are studying a quantitative field. It's hilarious, they will jerk each other off over taking Analysis at the level of what a 2nd year undergrad at a decent school would do.

We don't need to consume at unlimited speed. That's irrelevant. The point is that once one desire is satisfied, another will crop up. No one is permanently satisfied, even billionaires find themselves constantly chasing the next thrill.


Vast majority of econ students in my program are double-majoring in mathematics, statistics, finance, or other similar fields. Economists may be stupid, but it's certainly not a "bad at math" sort of stupid.

But that still means the idea of "satisfying infinite desire with finite resources", implying that you are always limited in resources, is true. You can get to a point where the resources replenish faster than the desires can be created.

Yeah, this is what is meant by "unlimited desire".

Of course in the phyiscal realm nothing is "unlimited", but here we're talking an abstract construct that represents an observable attitude in human beings

Ultimately economics is right in trying to explain the allocation of limited resources under the current system, but it's mainstream porky currents ultimately invent all sorts of metaphysical shit that doesn't even try to put forth a materialistic, structural of capitalism; which is exactly what Marx tried to do in Das Kapital.

Two points. Although we do have enough material wealth to satisfy everyone's fundamental needs, we're evidently still very far away from the sort of post-scarcity situation in which people's satisfaction is not limited by the available resources. Secondly, lecturers and textbooks have on several occasions pointed out that without scarcity there would be no need for economics. I don't see what you're getting salty about economists describing the nature of economic problems (efficient utilisation of scarce resources).

I dont believe in such a thing as unlimited desire.

this one?

To live as a human is to desire. There's no escaping it. But fine, let's say that there is some limit to human desire. Clearly, it's still beyond what we're capable of satisfying at the moment. If you have x units of resources available but desire x+1 units then you're still facing a situation of scarcity.

Yes, thank you.

mainstream economists don't take Austrians seriously.

Maybe its more that I take issue with the fact that every time this is mentioned, economists claim that we will always have scarcity simply because we have infinite desire, as if it is a black hole which you can dump stuff into for infinity instantly. They completely dismiss the fact that you remove the need for economics due to time being a resource required for satisfying desires, a resource which cannot be traded, produced or increased, a limit resource.

No one takes mainstream economics seriously though.

Here, allow me to dictate from some of my old text books.
Here is politics 101
And so on.
Here is sociology 101
I have a bunch of other stuff, but I can't be assed typing it up. You can see why I dropped sociology for politics.

Admittedly there's a lack of historical perspective in undergrad courses. But while it may seem silly to think about scarcity in terms of maximising the number of hot dogs that Sally can consume, or whatever, it does seem be generally true that we have to make tough decisions about how to allocate our resources. I can't remember the last time I was able to go "It's fine, I can have everything I want."


Could you elaborate or rephrase what you mean by this?

My experience of at university has been precisely the opposite. The sociology department is full of Marxists or at least posturing "radicals", while the politics department is full of smug technocratic liberals.

Don't get me wrong, the politics department is liberal as fuck, but they're far more pragmatic and open to discussing different ideas. The sociology department are "marxist" the way that the liberals on reddit or tumblr are marxist.

Yea sorry i should go to bed.

They completely dismiss the fact that you can remove the need for economics, because they dismiss the fact that even if you have limited resources and infinite desires, time is still a resource required to fullfill a desire. One cannot instantly eat a cake. Then since time is a limited resource we can't increase, it follows that time if the limiting factor, the bottleneck, in our eventual society, not the finite resources.

But most economists and teachers dismiss time as important solely because it does not bottleneck us today, and by rejecting time as important, use the quote in the OP as an argument against communism, claiming that "to each according of his needs" is unattainable.

Are modern economists more Keynesian?

Yes

GET

darn

Calm friend

Curios

Disagree. Consider this piece of econ101 wisdom:
This isn't merely unrealistic, it is logically false. Zooming in doesn't make the curve flat. Did they learn their geometry from Escher? Less wack formulation:
>We assume falling demand curves and on the production side we assume that small players act as if the demand curve were a horizontal line.

theres a joke on that: