Imaginative Economics

Many years ago—when a little creativity coursed through my brain—I used to visualize what the world might look like if everyone had my appreciation for persons, places, and things. It was an exercise in one aspect of economics known as “supply and demand.” If we could wave a magic wand and change our taste in things, we might see a dramatic hike or fall in the salaries of persons, as well as the price of activities and things we choose to spend our money on. If our collective tastes were dramatic enough, we could manipulate prices to the extent that we could control a large aspect of economics such that many items would no longer be made, others would flourish, while the salaries of a few people rose or those of many others fell like lead balloons.

After revealing a few of my personal likes and dislikes, they often started throwing objects at me. =smiles=

I was able to calm them down by letting them tell me about their likes and dislikes. The changes they made were so dramatic, that the goods and services available to everyone made our concentration of persons, places, and things look like both a comedy and freak show combined. They made party-time millionaires and billionaires out of students, with private yachts and jet planes, and beggars out of professors like me. But before the dust had settled, we had money left over from “what was” (a positive state), to “what could be” (a normative state). They chose the “Robin Hood” effect—taking from the rich and giving to the poor.

Since I am no longer connected to academia, now I ask: What economic changes might AD readers make? Here are a few of mine:

Television and Internet Programming:

• I would not pay a dime to sponsors to watch a professional golf match, or a basketball game, or baseball, or tennis, or rugby, or any other sport I can’t play very well. Also silly game shows would crash, as well as any program that wanted air time to show its wares 10,000 times over three days, or as soon as control groups started falling asleep or throwing up. That would yank big bucks from their pockets to our new pool of money holders.

• TV and Internet programming would quickly ban all preachers, all frivolous gadgets, gizmos, and messages that featured Neo Nazi garbage, and all grossly slanted political Flim Flam. In their place, we would see an increase in talented musicians, good actors, and gifted thinkers and doers—without being interrupted every three minutes by commercials created in cesspools.

• Every person or group who dared to ask for air time for any purpose would be fact-checked from the git-go. Loud-mouthed, empty-headed dorks and liars would be banned, and so would their sponsors. Politicians would be double-checked.

• All products would be banned that were merely drop-shipped from point A to point B with little or no liability for their safety, shelf-life, or utility. (Goodbye Amazon and all irresponsible shippers like them.)

• Consumers could not be compelled to open an account while giving up a lot of personal information such as date-of-birth, gender, address, telephone—just to see what the website was selling, or its price.

That is just a partial list to give you an idea of how we could begin to manipulate the manipulators, also how we could withhold our money from them, and eventually change the commercial/political landscape from what it is (a swamp) to what it could be (honesty with shared prosperity).

If you can visualize dictators using similar techniques to control your behavior via AI and subliminal injections methods, give yourself an “A”. The good guys call it a misuse of power and technology. The bad guys call it “mind control.” ■