Yet they constantly create products that require consumers to be irrational enough to fail to see through their greedy ploys. Almost like it’s all BS lies the greedy fucks tell themselves…
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ampersandrew@lemmy.world 6 days agoIn order to be efficient, it assumes people will act at least mostly rationally. It’s one of those things where it’s both true and false at the same time, somehow.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 6 days ago
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 6 days ago
No, they tell a lot of those same lies to their consumers, too, so the market is acting somewhat rationally related to what they’re told. It’s why you still have a “buy” button on store pages instead of “purchase temporary license” or “rent”.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Yea, like I said: greedy ploys. As long as people remain dumb enough to fail to see it for what it is, it’ll work.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 6 days ago
People generally do act rationally, just not optimally. The difference is rooted in availability of information and accumulation of priors.
“The Marshmallow Test” is a great example. People who are predisposed to distrust authority figures and experience chronic hunger will “fail” the test, because they rationally assume they better take the marshmallow now rather than put their trust in a second marshmallow later. This same group happens to underperform long term, not because they are short-sighted or dim-witted, but because they continue to experience the same psychological reinforcements - unreliable social services, inconsistent access to basic necessities, predation by private industry and law enforcement, notably higher rates of social murder - that lead them to take what’s in front of them rather than waiting patiently for a bigger reward.
The next big market crash will produce this kind of person in spades, just like 2008 and 2001 and 1987 did. As people experience retirement accounts as a scam and schools as a prison pipeline and professional careers as economic dead ends and police as occupying invaders, they stop engaging with these institutions innocently and start dealing with them adversarially.
Auntievenim@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Another thing I’d like to add, not that your comment wasnt very well argued but just to expand, the rationality of a decision to each individual is still coherent even when talking about sadistic and selfish decisions like those made by the oligarchs and corporate executives. Those actors are not irrational, they are rationally motivated by a completely different structure of stimuli, like you explained.
Capitalism is rational, the issue arises from the fact that a rational decision for someone with billions of dollars is universally irrational to anyone else. You cant expect a system of individualized economic success to allow rationality to be egalitarian.
That’s how we end up in these situations where millions must suffer the failures of a system they never benefitted from while the beneficiaries actively pursue the further dismantling of the system to increase their personal benefits from it.
You cant map the needs of millions and the needs of billionaires onto the same resource pool. The rational actions required to be taken in that environment is what leads to the inconceivable outcomes that make us question actors as irrational. They are personally acting in a rational, self preserving way, which just happens to be the most oppressive and dangerous to the masses.
I think you covered the mindstate of the masses pretty well in your comment, so I wanted to give some exposition towards the other side of the coin. In equal proportion, “Any individual action rationally follows from the prior experiences” applies both to those exploited by the system and those benefitting from it.