Economics – a world of its own, on its own

I’d like to start by asking capitalists to take a chill-pill and stop pretending like everything’s just fine. Everything’s clearly not fine and this is no time to be a spoiled little brat, turning a blind eye with our heads in the sand. We need to face the facts so that we can start working on solving issues. Economics is not supposed to be a world of its own. I get that it is based on assumptions, but some of the key assumptions have gone into ‘fairy tale’ category. This is causing considerable chaos, especially since many of those assumptions are seen as absolute and complete truth by decision makers.

I do not claim to have answers, I only intend to get people of will, courage, imagination and knowledge to start thinking outside the box. I only graduated Economics, so I am no professional in the field. But, as a professional in the field of citizen activism, I have observed numerous curious indicators.

1. Price is not determined by supply and demand. Products get priced randomly and this is particularly important at the age in which markets are flooded with products. We’ve never had so much choice. This choice has its good and bad side.

2. People are rational, generally speaking, but they draw their conclusions mainly by observing the world around them; i.e. Everything’s relative! Person’s happiness does not depend on how much they have, but how much they have relative to what they could have and what others have. Plus, when a person goes shopping, it’s not just about how much they get that matters, it is also about how many things they have to say ‘no’ to because they don’t have enough money. If they say ‘no’ more times than ‘yes’, this will make them feel sad.

3. ‘Over worked and under paid’ – OWUP – is not a myth, and it is not to be taken lightly or resolved by bringing in extra labour force who will be willing to work for ‘that’ wage without complaining. OWUP has a very negative effect on our family life and labour force. Possible causes: 1. One worker getting irrationally more money than another (reminder: everything’s relative), 2. Wage dose NOT equal to marginal productivity of labour, if it did, a firm would do better to employ managers to clean and cleaners to manage, 3. Market forces are almost evil to determine wages.

4. Dividing time between labour and leisure – most people do not face this, most people face bills and decisions how best to make money to cover the costs. This is one area where we have huge difference between different classes of people, so different that we need different theories for each class.  Bear in mind that we live in the age where parents are buying gifts for their children out of guilt for not being with them.

5. People are selfish COMMUNITY CREATURES. So ‘selfish’ and ‘giving’ have to coexist or we have chaos.

Well, I think that’s enough for now. I’m sure any decent economist will see how mistakes in these fields cause an effect on other parts, until we have the whole thing ‘kinda falling apart’.

There are many other issues. I wrote a part of an introduction in my book Just Another Life– I’m thinking I could get people a little more interested if I use fiction and write it as a dialogue; we’ll see. Plus, I didn’t even mention ‘social cost vs social benefit’ – that’s a BIG topic that we have to look into.