this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
488 points (100.0% liked)

Curated Tumblr

5378 readers
16 users here now

For preserving the least toxic and most culturally relevant Tumblr heritage posts.

Here are some OCR tools to assist you in transcribing posts:

Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

And I suspect you might even suggest the only real aspect of economics boils down to supply vs demand regardless of what the thing in supply or demand is?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Definitely not. The rules behind supply and demand hinge on some extremely flimsy assumptions, namely:

  • that people always act in their own best interest (they fucking don't)
  • that people can actually choose not to buy the product

For things like food, housing, medicine, etc. People don't get the luxury of voting with their wallets, and this is why the free market cannot allocate resources effectively.

Just because I went to school for economics does not mean I am a free market capitalist. I'm definitely not.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Ah ok, I see the flaw in my thinking.

Things that are always in demand don't drive a price solely based on supply, and since people don't act in their own best interest the actual demand of something can't be a useful way to determine the value of a thing.

So that sort of says to me that with a truly free market economy, it would be just as impossible to model future prices because of the inherent unpredictability of humans.