Market Research on market size and growth

Marketing
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It makes me wonder how ants and all other species known to man have allocated resources wonderfully for over 150 million years without it :wink:

I know, the point I make is ask 3 people what economic is and you will get 5 different answers :smiley: As a non provable or calculable “science” that assumes things will balance then it’s non trivial. THE Santa Fe Institute has a huge number of papers and conferences on economics.

An issue is this.

In science you have a theory, you repeat experiments and check it. In economics, you have a single experiment and when it fails we have summeria->greece->rome-> and so on. Each thought they were allocating resources of course, like USSR did. Each stated they knew the score and each failed in the first experiment.

As a science of mental maths with crazy unproven and unprovable assumptions then it’s open to everyone to be an economist and no economic system has survived so far, unless we think ours is “the one”.

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Bitcoin scripting is Forth-like - very simple- no loops - only does what it has to do and cannot do(or be made to do) anything else. I played about with Forth a bit in the late 80s but have forgotten almost all that i knew. We were considering it for an embedded controller to guide a telescope.

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And hence a free pass for the zealots of the Austrian School.

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Ants allocate resources so well despite their tiny brains because each one acts according to their local environment only, something which that tiny brain is actually capable of processing, with no single ant trying to control the whole colony.

I think you have a good point. People study things because they want to control them. Studying economics is all fine and good, but the problem is 99% of people who do it do so because they want to control the economy, despite the fact they probably can’t even organize their own life very well let alone the lives of billions.

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Ants and bees are genetically homogenous organisms - each ant or bee is an extension of it’s nest/hive just as an organ in a human is an extension of the body. Organs are not competitive with each other, they are genetically predisposed to be subordinate to the body - otherwise cancer, death, and elimination of those genes from the pool.

Other animals in competition with each other both compete and cooperate within the limits of their intelligence and ability. IMO, humans cooperate wonderfully with each other - to the extent that we can build amazing things like SN :wink:

However there are predators in the environment as well - be they different species that prey upon us, or cultural cancers (accumulators utilizing destructive economic systems).

I am a fan of the Austrian school of economic as well as the philosophies of Socrates/Hume/Popper … for me, these give humility and teach that value/perception is all subjective and that includes “truth”, which must be an individual exercise in pragmatism for our own continued survival, both genetically and memetically.

Personally I favor diversity - as i believe that biology and “Life” informs us that the universe doesn’t give a damn about the desires of mice and men, so the best bets are strongly hedged with multiple simultaneous ways/methods of survival. With that as my base, I am naturally inclined to facilitate isolation for the development and maintenance of diversity (decentralization) and to clash with those schools of economics and individuals & groups, that seek to mix/homogenize/centralize.

But we all have our own selfish views and reasons for choosing the paths we choose and maybe I’m wrong. Still, we each have to continue to fight those we believe are “destroying the world” - an intellectual immune system fighting the perceived cancer/parasites of the mind/culture/world-of-memes.

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+1

The prime directive being to feed and protect the queen. When they come across ants not in their colonies or species, they do the opposite of cooperate.

Edit for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5YaihAtnC4

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Here though each ant is an organism in a colony as a human is an organism in a society. It’s a side issue though and not one to fall down.

However the point is resource allocation is handled by nature, not by us, either as individual organisms or a society. This point is startling to me. That we think we can allocate the world/universes resources with money and all these complex financial instruments and all that jazz. The connectivity of everything is a balance and 5 loafs for a pig type resource allocation is incredibly missing the point. In any case I feel the issue is significantly deeper.

Economics as a means of resource allocation is way way to simple. It’s like saying cash allows stuff? Economics includes money supply, inflation, deflation, tax, political influence, human greed and much much more. It tries to balance an ever increasing set of resources and does so very well. So well in fact we are running out of planet.

Economics and economic theories amaze me in their simplistic assumptions, which are mostly stuff will balance automgically. From their all sorts of magic appears.

Folk say hire an economist and I actually am amazed, which one? The person who led the Fed, ECB, BOE, RBS, CityBank, Barclays or the Phd maths folk who work in Morgan Stanley, or perhaps the folks from EOS or Eth or … and so on. Which is the one we shoudl consult hire/listen to ?

It’s an area where I feel humans believe they are in control, until it all fails and then they say unprecedented stuff broke it. My point is unprecedented is natures normal balance and it surprises us only because we thought we were in control.

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I agree with a lot of this and definitely understand your frustration.

I feel they actually complicate things more than it needs to be. At the end of the day, it’s all just supply and demand and what the average human finds valuable/motivating (NOT the outlier human).

IMO, I think it’s more an economic historian who can distill down the lessons learned from history so that what’s put in place at least avoids those pitfalls. No one has the right answer otherwise.

+1
Maybe avoiding the pitfalls of those systems that failed would allow for an imperfect system that takes us far enough until its own pitfalls are discovered?

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Ants are very tribal and that cooperation is limited to the tribe.

This is why I favor the Austrian school of econ - as it accepts the idea that “we”, individually or collectively do not know - that our values are subjective, therefore we mustn’t force our views onto others. Instead we should aim for decentralization and allow for natural “markets” to organically determine/adjust/facilitate the economy. I.e. in nature, markets and economics exists as well - it’s a matter of whether we should allow these economies/markets to self-direct and self-manage or whether we allow some people wearing special hats to top-down control them.

Economics isn’t the means, it is the study of the means. An economy is the means and such just exists, even for bees/ant and their economy with the flowers/fungi.

“It” can be natural free decentralized markets, or top-down controlled ones. If the Earth was one giant singular ant-nest then we’d be in the a similar boat to where we are today with the top-down controlled economies. Both lead to an inability to determine the real “cost” of doing what we do. In economics this is known as the “economic calculation problem”.

I disagree. Most politicaly popular schools of economics don’t think things balance - that’s why they are strong interventionist (need more top-down control). The Austrian school does think things will balance (usually) IF we just let markets (nature) work. Of course, there is no utopia, so sometimes things do just fail.

Many good Austrian school authors, and you don’t have to hire them (most are dead anyway). Mises, Hayek, Hazlett, Rothbard.

Not the Austrian school. They think it’s arrogance to believe the economy can be controlled.

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which again is a reason for diversity in markets (natural markets) and not a singular top-down controlled one … because when that latter version fails, we all are forced into failing with it.

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Can you define a natural market? I mean in detail and considering all aspects. Not just a free to do anything or markets will balance naturally, as we know they don’t. To balance value must be correct, not in terms of I supply/demand but balance as in balance against the rest of the connected planet?

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Ants are very chemically sensitive and that cooperation is limited to those with whom they share the same pheromones (valid chemical hash signature)

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General Equilibrium Theory is pretty informative here (not for an answer but for where the holes are).

The two aspects that stand out most to me are the role of externalities, which is largely ignored in GET, but I feel is a very significant factor in real life (especially positive externalities). And also the assumption of convex preferences, I reckon the non-convexity of many real life preferences, both individual and group preferences, is one of the major failures of economics.

A lot of economics seems to be a kind of Rorschach Test.

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So two things really - a natural market and a natural marketplace (group of similar markets).

Natural markets:

At the most basic level we have barter between trading parties. I have X, you want X; You have Y, I want Y. So we negotiate a rate of exchange for these items and this negotiation changes over time through circumstance.

The bees and the flowers do this sort of barter - nectar + pollen for pollen distribution. The ants and the fungi do as well - the fungus gives part of itself as food and the ants feed the fungus and distribute it to new locations.

IMO then, a natural market is a non-coerced market where there are just the parties trading involved - as opposed to what I think of as a coercive market, where there is a dominant third-party parasite involved - a party that doesn’t offer anything in exchange, but forces it’s way in and takes a percent of the trade for itself causing the market traders to alter their “prices” or ratios of traded goods/services in order to deal with the addition burden added by the parasite.

If the market parasites are overly successful, then they destroy one or more of the trading parties and the market dies.

Humans do the same, but have enhanced markets via money wich allows much more specialization of production - including tools, giving us more control over our daily existence. We invented money to make trade much easier, but such also has made it easier for the parasites to get involved in the trades and also for monopolists working with parasites – although monopolists do not survive for long in markets that lack coercion/parasites (see: Watch this video! :) - #482 by TylerAbeoJordan).

A natural marketplace:

Any individual market can fail at any time - Nature tells us that we can’t be sure of the future, so we living things, just pragmatically attempt to predict it and we trade based on our best guesses. The key for the survival globally then, is a diverse array of markets - separate traders each with their own pragmatic evaluations of reality. So that when nature throws a curve ball, not all markets will hopefully fail, some will thrive, others will hang on and adapt, others will be eliminated (the dinosaurs had one hell of a curve ball). This diverse marketplace is what I consider a natural marketplace. It’s also evolution - as genes (and memes) themselves are involved in a marketplace where they trade their services for their continued existence in the pool. Dawkin’s book “The Selfish Gene” introduced these ideas to genetics.

Balance for the connected planet is why diversity is critical IMO. Centralization vs decentralization is a constant battle. As things become hyper-centralized, the “economic calculation problem” makes the marketplace blind, accelerating it’s collapse. Just as any individual market always eventually fails a centralized marketplace can fail too.

So fighting to reduce centralizing forces (parasites and monopolists) moves us closer to what I like to think of as a natural “in balance” marketplace (group of markets). Whereas centralizing forces, parasites and monopolists fight to move things to an un-natural state by destroying markets - thus consolidating the marketplace and moving all marketplace participants closer to collapse.

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I thought this was a perfect summation, until I read this →

Which really does sum up many of my issues.

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You should read “a thousand brains theory” to see the difference of the selfish gene (old brain) and higher level capability (in the neocortex).

I feel this is an oversimplification. The old brain or lower-level organisms are naturally limited via a lack of higher-order capability (nature creates a natural supply/demand cycle that allows more food → eat then balance with eating too much, less food now etc. i.e. the fox and rabbit in the selfish gene). We have the higher-level capability and can destroy at scale. We do that by “designing” market parameters and can largely ignore natures balance. This is an important issue that differentiates us and makes us dangerous. Again design based on invalid initial assumptions. This Austrian or any design of economics to me has invalid and sometimes completely zero initial assumptions on the connectivity of all of nature. Focus on money as the substitute for the foxes rabbits is where the imbalance starts.

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well yeah … I mean, I’m not going to write a paper on the topic in a forum.

I tried to distinguish between the micro (market) and macro (marketplace) of economic thinking. A micro (market) failure doesn’t destroy the macro world (unless it has been consolidated - i.e. we all shop at amazon); in fact a micro failure informs other micro’s what not do do … a diverse marketplace is full of feedbacks that insure longevity.

Human markets are more complex - as are our brains. Evolution is still in play.

The Austrian school specifically does NOT engage in attempting to design interventions in markets. That is left to the Keynesians, the Marxists, and their relatives. The Austrian school advocates for natural processes. The Austrian school’s assumptions are simpy that the other schools are arrogant in thinking they can successfully control natural markets or somehow make them ‘better’.

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@dirvine

A fun way to explain some of the Austrian school ideas with music:

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The problem with many economic schools is they attempt to prescribe solutions, which inevitably require force/coercion to implement. If you require people to be corralled into complying, it is in the bin for me. I favour decentrised systems and economics is no exception.

However, we live in a world literally defined by violence. Every border on the planet is the result of some fight to dominate a region, its people, its resources. While this persists, how can we ignore the contradictions in law, which punish such actions? How can we support statism with it’s flagrant disrespect of individuals?

The economics of a distributed software system must also be distributed. There can be no centralising force, predetermining how users must comply to favour some specious goal. The only goal should be the sustainability of the network and its core features.

The Austrian school seems to be the only one aligned philosophically. It doesn’t require a centralized agency to manipulate people. It is more an observation of how people best cooperate when they are allowed to freely associate, with all the complexity and volatility that may come along with it.

For the safe network, punishing and removing nodes and/or users which attempt to monopolise data for personal gain is comparable to keeping thieves and gangs at bay. It is its system of law and order, allowing others to freely associate. At that point, Austrian economics becomes important, as it is the only theory that will fit.

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Fantastic :+1:t2::+1:t2:

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