The Function of Capitalist Monetary Valuation of Goods and Services
How much is the major function of a market economy, i.e., the assignment of monetary values, or at least, relative values, to goods and services in a marketplace, about maximizing efficiency, and how much is it really about control?
I would like to posit that the function of a capitalist system is in fact more driven by memetic factors than by price and money and investment factors. One issue is where the theories of microeconomics (and macroeconomics) of value and supply and demand are in fact based on circular assumptions or non-falsifiable hypothesis. Assumptions such as "perfect information" and "price competition" and "supply-demand curves" are in fact imaginary ideas which simply cannot be linked to anything concrete, or which are circular in nature, i.e., quantities are mutually dependent on one another in systems which lack sufficient variables to allow for them to be solved deterministically.
Another problem which hints at memetic factors being the main drivers of the system as opposed to the fantastical and "just-so" stories of conventional economic theory is the fact that, as one might say, "The US Economy is efficient, but one may well ask what it is that it is efficient at".
In other words, the economy is widely known to not optimize obvious things like "human happiness" or even things like "everybody being healthy" or even "fed". Why should this be? There are a plethora of immunomemes that defend this irrational situation, which is a strong indicator that memetics rules over any other system dynamics, as is usually to be expected in systems depending upon the dynamics of interactions between humans (except for very simple "games" with rigid rules).
This suggests that supposed economic factors such as "price competition", "money supply", "economic freedom", "employment rates", "average salaries", and such are in fact MIAOs and loaded with all sorts of memes which defend and propagate the system.
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On Capitalism....
The idea that things may be valued
in terms of some (supposedly) objective, agreed-upon, standard means
that everybody can communicate in terms of that standard.
The fact
of the matter is, however, that the super-rich are still royalty, but
they are not the faces on the money (which perhaps they never were),
they are invisible, and they use the memes of the proletariat around
money, to do with money, in order to manipulate them, in addition to the
money itself. "I gave you a little bit of my royalty" (which was never
possible or conceivable before) which is probably not even true -- there
is a critical mass. So Capitalism may probably be described as a very
viable virile successful memetic system, and that may be that it
creates this MIAO of money. And, as evidenced by the preeminence and predominance of paper fiat currency, the concept of money, the abstract
MIAO of money is more important than the reality. Could the idea of
money be a kind of MEMETIC NEXUS? Whatever you invent will step into the
nexus and stay there, no matter how you try to mess with it.
Feminism
and the monetization of women's time and ultimately forcing them into
the workforce. What is the right role for women...or men?
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The Marvelous and Mercurial MIAO of "Money"
Money is a MIAO around which shared INTERFACE MEMES may be attached. That is probably why CAPITALISM is successful.
Other
systems such as monarchism or feudalism have a more difficult and
complicated job, and are less flexible and ultimately less successful.
The contact memes and interface memes to do with the shared MIAO, money
(shared MIAOs are critical), allow people with totally different
motivational systems and goals to coexist and work together in the same
environment. People with one memetic inventory (of one memetic state or
cohort) assume that those in another state are actually working for the
same thing.
This is a challenge for the
cohort/inventory/state idea. If there are many groups, e.g., owning
class, middle class (managerial class), and working class, and
marginalized peoples, which cohorts are they all in, how do they access
the shared MIAOs (money, mainly), and does the relationship of
inventories defining cohorts still work? There are contact memes that
connect cohorts, i.e., how one subgroup views another. There are also
the contact (or interface?) memes, say, for a rich person versus a
middle-class person vis-a-vis a corporation. The investment/reward
systems portrayed to each are probably quite different, and may make
more or less sense to each. Perhaps everything makes sense to everybody
all the time, though perhaps not logically, unless one is in memetic
destitution, i.e., not having enough memetic rewards available through
engaging with the prevailing ideology. A middle-class or working person
may feel perfectly normal relating to the corporation or to the
government, although it cause them a great deal of suffering and
dissatisfaction, and so they do not feel moved to rise in rebellion or
violence because there are still ample memetic reward opportunities to
be had and memetic loops to be closed.
One interesting function of money may be the storing of memetic debt, a concept which may provide us with a much richer and extensible model of the difference between monetary systems and bartering, in psychological terms and otherwise.
Every Economic Transaction is an Action Meme
Also known as a "functional meme", it is the taking of some action. Buying something, using something, spending money (an imaginary activity with real consequences, rather like prayer, one might say), providing services, not taking action which one might otherwise take, etc. All of these are memes enacted by human beings, most of them imitations of something one has learnt previously.
The point is that any such action taken is in response to a memetic state established by the series of actions of other memes leading up to the action itself. As such, its occurrence is governed by the principles (laws) of (macro)memetics. "Economics" is just a ham-fisted 10,000-foot-view collective expression of these phenomena. Any model of memetics that can analyze the memetic landscape of a given cohort and provide a picture of its transition matrix will be a good predictor of "economic activity", up to and including behaviors such as "incorrect beliefs", "inflexible demand", Greenspanian "soft landings", and so forth.
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模倣子 Memetic Essay, Memetics - Memetic Index
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