Is the economy a good engineering model of civilization at large?
Yes or no answers only, with justifications pls.
No, “it depends” or “yes and no” bs.
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The economy is explicitly not a model. It's just a set of rules. It works because it respects the fact that the system is too complex to be modeled.
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I need to introduce you to some economists who haven’t heard this
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Yes but not detailed enough nor resilient enough to account for non-economic or hard-to-quantify human experiences and expressions like emergent and guerrilla art, fads, cascading errors and unintended consequences especially of lower orders.
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The peculiarities of vice and violent crime are also, by nature of their taboo and typically illegal status, tough to model and track, imo.
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No, because it only knows how to model certain interactions and completely ignores everything it can’t model. Most labor is unpaid. It’s like modeling a galaxy without dark matter.
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the economy is an emergent effect of smaller, simpler models
portions can be understood and explained but this is akin to asking if day-to-day personal productivity is a good model for understanding health
generally yes but many factors
can be productive short-term but unhappy
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Yes. Conceptually. Only in the sense that you can more clearly observe emergent order, network effects, incentives, preferences, and non-biological evolution. If it was the one thing you had to look at to understand human civilization, it would be pretty good.
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