Hacking the Economy

Hacking the economy is easier than it looks. The first step, of course, is to remember that the economy itself is just a model. It’s a way of understanding the world as a series of transactions made by rational, self-interested beings working to maximize value for themselves. That’s supposedly the given.

Of course, it isn’t even true. We don’t live in an economy. Never did. If we were really all playing some sort of poker game for chips — and making all the right decisions —— then our world might behave like an economy. But seeing as how we’re really more concerned with our moment-to-moment experience, getting laid, or finding a private place to poop, the last thing on our minds is retention of value over time.

We do live amongst some really big economic actors though. And the more we mistake the stage on which they act for the world in which we live, the less access we have to script. We end up in the audience, watching the financial spectacle and — worst of all — mistaking it for real life.

The economy we live in is a rigged game, established around the time of the Renaissance in order to promote the welfare of early-chartered corporations and the monarchs who gave them license to monopolize world business.

Read the rest at h+ Magazine.