Well, now I think about it, most feedback is annoying.
Economics is full of it — as are other economic systems — and humans find it so annoying they have devised various means of shutting it down, and then become puzzled and do crazy stuff when the system goes out of control.
Take price controls. They deliberately shut down feedback. The idea is “people need to eat and the essentials should be cheap”. We went tons of rounds on this in the seventies in Portugal. It was FUN — not — and responsible for empty grocery shelves and problems getting the essentials. Because when cooking oil was dirt cheap by price control, everyone who had ridden this pony before (with bread, with toilet paper, with …) would buy everything in the grocery shelves. Meanwhile, because it was impossible for merchants to make a profit on the thing, they didn’t stock it. Which was okay, because the factories that made it couldn’t afford to at that price, so they stopped. And all the way down the line.
This is because what the idiot politicians were shutting down was the feedback. Prices are many things — and sometimes annoying when you really want a good pair of noise-cancelling headphones but your bank account is crying, to use a totally random example — but MOSTLY? They’re information. They’re feedback.
Because, yes, people work for profit, and profit — things that Warren and Sanders will never get — is not dirty, it’s what people live on, when prices go up — meaning there’s more demand than supply — people go “hey, you can make a profit in this” and start making more, until the supply and demand match, and you can’t make as much money, so people wander off to do other stuff.
You shut down the signal, and things go insane. You keep it shut down long enough while handing down lists of things that the government wants you to make, and vast famines sweep the land but you have a surplus of size 35 shoes for the left foot only. Because the directive handed the factory made that the easiest thing to do.
But it is not just in economics (though eh, everything is a branch of economics, as my reading in my 30s informed me. Which means that’s probably when I started going insane) that humans love shutting down feedback.
The truth is we don’t like reality very much, and are more or less perpetually at war with it.
We have this image of how things should be, and because we imagine it so clearly we think it’s a moral imperative.
Sarah Hoyt, “Shutting Off Feedback or How We Got Into This Fine Mess”, According to Hoyt, 2019-11-04.
June 3, 2024
QotD: Economic feedback
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