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To: Alberta's Child

I'm not disputing that -- What you didn't mention is that the entire free market economy is a human construct and therefore can't be compared to a single organism. The fact that humans alone among all the species on the planet have the capacity to create a "free-market economy" tells me that human ingenuity is not the result of a random process.

If you can find any evidence of monkeys in Africa buying and selling bananas on a futures market, I'll gladly concede the argument. Since you probably can't even imagine something as nonsensical as that (due to the inherent, permanent place that monkeys have as a form of life lower than humans), you'd have to say I've got a point.

No, that's not the point. The point is that even with our intelligence, nobody actually sat down and designed the economy. It just evolved. In fact, nobody can even predict the future structure of the economy with any specificity. This evolving system has "a mind of its own", so to speak.

159 posted on 06/07/2002 3:15:18 PM PDT by jennyp
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To: jennyp
No, that's not the point. The point is that even with our intelligence, nobody actually sat down and designed the economy. It just evolved. In fact, nobody can even predict the future structure of the economy with any specificity. This evolving system has "a mind of its own", so to speak.

Your whole train of thought here is very confusing to me, for it seems to support some points I've been making in other posts. Economics may be an "evolutionary" process in terms of how things change in a process that is often unpredictable, but the fact that any "economy" is nothing more than an interaction between rational human beings at its root makes any comparison to evolution in the plant and animal kingdoms pointless. You seem to be confusing "evolution" with "development," and "unpredictability" with "chaos." A comparison between free-market economics (something that is unique to the human species, particularly in that a system can be passed from one generation to the next) and an evolutionary process that is the result of natural forces, isn't an accurate one.

What economics does show us, though, is that human beings are unique among animals in that our rational minds give us some measure of control over our own "evolutionary process." If a certain species of animals is living in an area that undergoes a dramatic change in climate, "natural selection" tells us that the members of that species that learn to adapt (either by moving elsewhere or by being strong enough to deal with the changes) will survive, while those that do not will die off.

Humans aren't constrained by this kind of limitation because they can "adapt" without any real change in their physical condition (their location or their physical attributes). If the world suddenly turned colder, I could survive in a reasonable manner by dressing in heavier clothing and building a home that is more insulated. I don't even have to know anything about making clothing or building homes -- I simply have to know someone who does and pay him for his product or his services. Where else in the evolutionary process does something like this occur?

Even under these colder conditions my life may not change all that much. Instead of buying bread made from North Dakota wheat I'd be buying bread made from South American wheat, and I (unlike any other animal) wouldn't be required to migrate to South America to get it.

203 posted on 06/07/2002 6:33:36 PM PDT by Alberta's Child
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