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To: jennyp
Lets keep it simple Jebby. :-}

Markets at their base are two individuals, one wanting to sell something and one wanting to buy that something. The purpose of that transaction is to profit the buyer and the seller. Markets in the macro sense, if you insist, are individulas and corporations doing exactly what the other two guys are doing. All done with a purpose, that purpose to profit from the transaction. To that purpose planning, complexity and direction are applied by those individuals and corporations.

So the market at large is the sum of all those planning, little intelligent, busy as a bee capitalists. Now take away the intelligence, the indivdual, the planning, the direction and the complexity. What happens to the larger market?

344 posted on 01/26/2006 6:15:16 PM PST by jwalsh07
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To: jwalsh07
So the market at large is the sum of all those planning, little intelligent, busy as a bee capitalists. Now take away the intelligence, the indivdual, the planning, the direction and the complexity. What happens to the larger market?

It slows down - all the way down to the glacial pace of biological evolution. And the rampant horizontal meme transfer that occurs as companies copy innovations from each other pretty much stops.

It'd slow down so badly that we'd all be living like savages again. ('course if you removed the intelligence from the actors then that would mean we WOULD be just savages anyway... but I digress. :-)

Since biological evolution is a system where the actors are not very intelligent (the brainpower of the organisms doesn't enter into it much), the whole process takes many generations to produce new biological features or species; whereas industries or economies can make major changes in a couple decades. And before Darwinian evolution was able to get started with the first self-replicating protocell, it probably took 100-500 million years for organic chemistry to reach the complexity necessary for life to get started.

The fact that the actors in biological evolution are not intelligent is not a difference in kind. It's a difference in degree. (Even though a big one.)

564 posted on 01/27/2006 12:13:53 AM PST by jennyp (WHAT I'M READING NOW: your mind)
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