Thanks for the great read! I really appreciated the move toward real modeling. One point that I would love to discuss further (I think it's implied in the Hayek thread) is scarcity. Ideas don’t behave like scarce goods. Production and replication are nearly costless, even for bad ideas. That frictionless spread complicates the whole selection mechanism.
I am not sure, I am not an economist, if there is a model for text based entertainment, like X formerly twitter and the like.
It seems your model and the metaphor are based on some expectation of utility of ideas at some point in the future, so bad ideas would be like tobacco: it will take maybe decades for them to show its harms. And people smoke tobacco just to get a fix now, not in 30yrs.
So, Ideas as entertainment probably has an economic model, detailed for easy to write text infotainment pieces, I think such could do it. And the harms as externalities does not explain the harm to the consumers, there are examples of people believing Soap Operas somehow are relevant to life beyond entertainment, or asking for treatments not really shown to be safe and effective. Or you know electing some official or supporting a given Law, with its long term effects.
And a text infotainment sort of market has a really really low barrier of entry... like snake oil peddlers...
You don´t need an MD in Cosmetic/Plastic Surgery to talk about Trans Surgeries, for example, nor a Neuropathology MD, a subspecialty of Clinical Pathology with its own MD, to talk about Mental Illnesses. And several more.
I am not sure how the model considers Ideas are not comparable, how does substitution apply to Ideas?, I am tired or there is no more of this rhetoric and now I am going the opposite way?.
It might look like that, but a lot of Ideas nowadays, to my thinking are more of the Fundamentalist type: purity, exclusion, indoctrination, inability to backtrack, us versus them, etc. I´ve written about it, but in this context it seems to me like very bad tobacco spiked with fentanyl: A serious addiction imposible to treat because it leads to Radicalization.
And I´ve read several attempts to De-Radicalize racists, for example, which would be with an "offer" of new ideas and some dialog, and there are several narratives, some empirical, including Wikipedia claiming De-Radicalization is so far impossible.
So it is not a free, truly free markets as Illegal Drug Markets are not: consumers cannot just stop using them and go read the New York Times instead. And they cannot just replace one addictive substance for another, but they can add...
And it still has a low barrier of entry.
I´ve wrote about it as a Lemon Market for Ideas, blaming Philosophy and Academics because they lost relevance in a World looking for Science, instead of Humanities. Even, I guess, Philosophers were in Competition with Theologians for College Students, which led to Lemons galore to me. But, it did not fly very far, so I erased those writings of mine.
But yours sort of picks it more fundamented, although I admit for most laypersons in parts might look blah blah blah, such is the Market!.
Then again, sorry to bother, I have a Post of why Economics is not a Science, it is in Spanish, I haven´t translated it, and I probably never will as it goes, but it adds to my writings questioning so many "Sciences" which are not Sciences at all, they are Humanities:
And I got some others on why they are not, there are relatively long and apparently hard to follow and accept, so... Radicalization and its inability to backtrack!, to me...
Thanks, nice post, it goes along how I was thinking.
Thanks for the very nice reference to my post, and very interesting post!
Thanks for the great read! I really appreciated the move toward real modeling. One point that I would love to discuss further (I think it's implied in the Hayek thread) is scarcity. Ideas don’t behave like scarce goods. Production and replication are nearly costless, even for bad ideas. That frictionless spread complicates the whole selection mechanism.
Really appreciated the piece!
So Ideas are not even widgets, so sad...
I am not sure, I am not an economist, if there is a model for text based entertainment, like X formerly twitter and the like.
It seems your model and the metaphor are based on some expectation of utility of ideas at some point in the future, so bad ideas would be like tobacco: it will take maybe decades for them to show its harms. And people smoke tobacco just to get a fix now, not in 30yrs.
So, Ideas as entertainment probably has an economic model, detailed for easy to write text infotainment pieces, I think such could do it. And the harms as externalities does not explain the harm to the consumers, there are examples of people believing Soap Operas somehow are relevant to life beyond entertainment, or asking for treatments not really shown to be safe and effective. Or you know electing some official or supporting a given Law, with its long term effects.
And a text infotainment sort of market has a really really low barrier of entry... like snake oil peddlers...
You don´t need an MD in Cosmetic/Plastic Surgery to talk about Trans Surgeries, for example, nor a Neuropathology MD, a subspecialty of Clinical Pathology with its own MD, to talk about Mental Illnesses. And several more.
I am not sure how the model considers Ideas are not comparable, how does substitution apply to Ideas?, I am tired or there is no more of this rhetoric and now I am going the opposite way?.
It might look like that, but a lot of Ideas nowadays, to my thinking are more of the Fundamentalist type: purity, exclusion, indoctrination, inability to backtrack, us versus them, etc. I´ve written about it, but in this context it seems to me like very bad tobacco spiked with fentanyl: A serious addiction imposible to treat because it leads to Radicalization.
And I´ve read several attempts to De-Radicalize racists, for example, which would be with an "offer" of new ideas and some dialog, and there are several narratives, some empirical, including Wikipedia claiming De-Radicalization is so far impossible.
So it is not a free, truly free markets as Illegal Drug Markets are not: consumers cannot just stop using them and go read the New York Times instead. And they cannot just replace one addictive substance for another, but they can add...
And it still has a low barrier of entry.
I´ve wrote about it as a Lemon Market for Ideas, blaming Philosophy and Academics because they lost relevance in a World looking for Science, instead of Humanities. Even, I guess, Philosophers were in Competition with Theologians for College Students, which led to Lemons galore to me. But, it did not fly very far, so I erased those writings of mine.
But yours sort of picks it more fundamented, although I admit for most laypersons in parts might look blah blah blah, such is the Market!.
Then again, sorry to bother, I have a Post of why Economics is not a Science, it is in Spanish, I haven´t translated it, and I probably never will as it goes, but it adds to my writings questioning so many "Sciences" which are not Sciences at all, they are Humanities:
https://federicosotodelalba.substack.com/p/la-economia-no-es-una-ciencia?r=4up0lp
And I got some others on why they are not, there are relatively long and apparently hard to follow and accept, so... Radicalization and its inability to backtrack!, to me...
Thanks, nice post, it goes along how I was thinking.
Oh, the tragedy of the commons in lemon Ideas markets pops into my mind...