NSmolenskiFan on Nostr: As Peter Boettke points out, the main distinction between schools of economic thought ...
As Peter Boettke points out, the main distinction between schools of economic thought that fall into error vs. those that hold over time is whether they accept and build upon the reality of scarcity.
If you don’t assume scarcity, nothing that flows from that concept holds: the regulating function of prices, the incentive structures of property and jurisdiction, the ability of economic actors to make trade-off decisions and learn from them over time.
Quite simply, scarcity is the organizing principle of economics. Without it, we enter an antigravity world—of course not in fact (gravity continues to exist), but in ideas and action. Navigating a world based on a faulty world-model eventually leads to being wrecked.
If you don’t assume scarcity, nothing that flows from that concept holds: the regulating function of prices, the incentive structures of property and jurisdiction, the ability of economic actors to make trade-off decisions and learn from them over time.
Quite simply, scarcity is the organizing principle of economics. Without it, we enter an antigravity world—of course not in fact (gravity continues to exist), but in ideas and action. Navigating a world based on a faulty world-model eventually leads to being wrecked.