[extropy-chat] Can the Future Do Without Economic Logic?

[Technotranscendence]

On Saturday, December 09, 2006 4:07 PM Damien Broderick
thespike at satx.rr.com wrote:
>> Not by those acting mainly on monkey
>> motivations, but by agents operating at
>> higher levels of organization, no?
>
> Which Charlie Stross was playfully hinting
> at in his projections of whuffie incentives
> and hypercalculational planning mocked by
> these economics students (quite possibly
> with good cause, but maybe not).

Not having read his novel, I can't say.  :)  Heck, I'm still trying to
polish off the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, so it'll be a while.  :/

Understand, too, that the mises.org crowd are going to focus on their
favorite subjects, so when they come to any work of fiction, I expect
them to be more sensitive to economics -- maybe to the point that they
miss some wider issue.  (This is not to say they're, to a man, myopic to
the point that they can't see anything but economics in any work.  In
fact, I offer up Paul Cantor as an interesting counterexample.  See,
especially, his work on esthetics, such as _Gilligan Unbound_ and his
lectures.*)

Regards,

Dan

*  The description for his online lectures reads:

"Paul Cantor, Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the
University of Virginia, is a pioneer in literary criticism from an
Austrian perspective. Having studied with Ludwig von Mises, he is
working to counter the Marxist understanding of culture that dominates
in the humanities today."

Link:

http://www.mises.org/media.aspx?action=category&ID=91

I highly recommend them.