If you want to understand how societies were hijacked by economies, you need to understand the total fiction…

If you want to understand how societies were hijacked by economies, you need to understand the total fiction at the middle of every economy. ‘Supply and demand’. Once you get that, everything from traffic to housing to Covid will make sense. /1 https://t.co/LXkarpA5TQ

Ever since the invention of the car, societies have tried to manage the traffic that vehicles get stuck in. The problem has been misinterpreted as there being a ‘demand’ for new and bigger and better roads, and that’s what’s then been built. /2 https://t.co/LXkarpA5TQ

Except that always made the problem worse, not better. More cars, more traffic. As Wired point out in this article, what creates traffic is roads. Not cars. Building roads ‘induces’ demand for driving. /3 https://t.co/LXkarpA5TQ

Just as building dams induces demand for water. This isn’t hard to see, if you’re not an economist. If you make something available, people will often want even more of it. Travel another good example. Whole industries will be created using this new supply. /4

You need to strip the concept back to its roots. ‘Supply and demand’ is premised on the idea that left to themselves, people and groups will reach an equilibrium point of optimum efficiency in not only provision of goods and services, but also in how they live socially. /5

That’s ‘the market’, the same concept. It’s pure libertarian fantasy, projected into supposedly objective economics and from there into public policy. It has not one connection with the reality of how humans actually act. Because people always act socially. /6

They imitate and emulate one another, in status hierarchies. What we call politics and even business is the same social process, re-badged with other names. All political parties are just teams in these social status games. All companies too. /7

Nobody lives in a market, there is no equilibrium reached through the competition of billions of individuals, all maximising the utility to themselves. All nonsense. Supply and demand is a fairy tale. ‘Induced demand’ shows it, build bigger roads, you’ll get more traffic. /8

Supply and demand is a political/social belief, designed to replace existing social relationships with ones that favour the status and therefore wealth and power, of those who profit from there being no social regulation. It’s as simple as that. /9

It allows rank piracy and looting and pillaging to be described as ‘the market’ at work. Except there is no market. There’s what there always is, and always has been. People acting with imitative rivalry to build social status hierarchies, through emulation and imitation. /10

Listen to how politicians say the answer to major social problems like housing or energy, is ‘more supply’. More dwellings, more gas etc. All PR from the housing and gas industries, who of course profit handsomely from more housing, and more gas. /11

More housing, unsurprisingly, induces demand for - more housing. People accumulate properties, because it makes them rich. And it becomes a social status, being a property owner. Having more and bigger and better located properties. /12

It’s not even an elephant in the room that many people own multiple properties, while many others own none at all. And that every support to more ‘supply’ over the years just meant the former group grew in size even more. And increased their portfolios. /13

As I say with Covid a lot, we will not understand humans and their problems if we keep applying a laughable set of concepts like supply and demand, and the market, to social behaviour. Which is what ALL human behaviour is. Those concepts simply excuse anti-social bullies. /14

Who take over everything, and justify it by pointing to these ridiculous beliefs, saying it’s the market at work, producing some fantasy equilibrium of efficiency. Unfettered by the basic regulation which actually enables all societies. Rules, law. To finish with Covid. /15

I’ve said a lot of times that we need to stop thinking that we stopped all action on the pandemic. That’s not what was done. That action was *privatised*. We privatised lockdowns, for example, by forcing people to do (and pay for) their own isolation when sick. /16

We turned a pandemic into a market, as we do for housing, energy and everything else. Assuming that it would all reach a glorious equilibrium, through supply and demand. And like with energy and housing, that’s not actually happening, because the whole thing is a fantasy. /end