CY
Joined: Oct 22, 2002
Posts: 14
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CY
Hey Geoff,
Adam Smith was indeed wrong; the invisible hand may tend to efficiently allocate scarce resources between two parties, but it does not even begin to address, let alone maximize, societal utility. If I offer two bucks to your tiki bar owner for a museum quality Tiki artifact I know to be worth 50 times that on ebay and he not only accepts but feels good about having two bucks in his pocket, where is the net gain for society? The answer is there isn't any. I studied John Nash's game theory extensively as an economics graduate student (and I enjoyed the movie) but while his theories can be applied to even the most global aspects of trade, they are still predicated on the most basic premise of capitalism- enhancing one's own revenue, marginal utility or political capital at a trade partner's expense. You may make nice with mexico and brazil to get cheap imports, but that utility always comes at somebody else's expense. Face it, until people want to look at a salmon swimming upstream and realize he does it despite odds of 10,000 to 1 he'll ever complete the journey to spawn and perpetuate the species and a zero percent chance he'll survive even if he does, there's still going to be awareness of self and ego and people who don't give a damn about anything but themselves.
Good post; lofty stuff for a tiki forum.
Have you ever read Oscar Wilde's definition of a cynic?
-Lest I be labeled a hypocrite, we bought the Byar's scrapbooks from a dealer for several hundred dollars, and donated them in their entirety to the IRB museum; see Geoff, altruism isn't dead.
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