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Comment by saimiam | Hacker News Reader

If it were all BS, how do you explain success stories like the Internet and the notion that countries on Dell’s supply chain won’t go to war with each other?

Fundamentally, economics is the belief that humans have self-interests and act on them.

Economics is obviously not 100% right - it’s not a physical science - but more often than not, you can see it in action.

Economics is closer to weather science - we can make certain inferences and predictions which can be wrong but the basic working theory is broadly correct, imho.

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I think youre confusing a religious like belief in capitalism that posits that "greed is good" despite any contra indication with economics, which is a discipline where conjecture is taught as fact and empiricism if frowned upon.

I'm not even going to touch your examples. They are completely illogical? Dell? The Internet?? Thats one company, and a technology.

If you read the wealth of nations, the only real promise of capitalism is that competition lowers prices, and thats why its considered "good" not because it solves all problems. I believe that, the rest is ill-supported conjecture.

To point out the global stupidity that is economics, there is absolutely no consideration for the concept of a constraint. Constraints are a fundamental problem in optimization.

This article lays it out nicely. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/rethink-the-growth-imper...

Research this topic and you'll find economists arguing insistently that the conservation of mass or energy don't exist.

Nowhere did I say that economics = greed is good capitalism.

Economics is fundamentally a study of how human and human society processes self interest.

It tries to find broad patterns in how we process self interest and then supports or subverts those patterns. To build on your example, capitalism reinforces self-interest while communism tries to regulate self interest. Both are economic theories.

Two countries on Dell’s supply chain not wanting to fight against each other is an example of weighing self interest and deciding that participating in a global supply chain is worth more than fighting a war.

The internet was in large part made possible because of government funded multi-year research during the cold war. It was largely ruined through commercialization and privatization, on all its layers.

The demand for Internet was an economic event where the efficiencies it afforded - quick, low cost communication, scale etc - made it attractive.

Other countries had invented the Internet (France, I believe) but it went nowhere.

Other comms technologies have been invented - Iridium satellites e.g. - but they died. Even distributed Internet based systems like Ipfs have the technology but not the adoption.

Technology is a part of the story but the success and spread of the US backed Internet is an economic story.

That the Internet has balkanised into walled gardens is downstream problem of successful products getting shittified until someone steps in a creates an alternative.

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