They’re taught that the long run is simply a succession of short runs and that therefore short term and long term economic thinking and planning are the same,which is,of course, glaringly wrong.
Anything to fill the insatiable hole in them where a soul would be in a real human.
They constantly fall under fallacies of composition or aggregation. To think in the aggregate and long term is largely thrown under the rug.
It’s “right” for a single company to slash wages and gut employment to seek higher profit margins… But when every company does it, it ultimately destroys the capacity of the bottom to uphold the top and it collapses.
Yeah what you’re describing, in computerized maths, is called a “local minimum”.
When you’re seeking out a global minimum of a function, such as in this example:
You might be tempted to think “well, i start somewhere, then i take one small step after another, always going downhill, until i am at the lowest point”. But what happens in practice, is that you get stuck in so called “local minimums”. For a visualization:
That is the fundamental problem with being short-sighted (i.e., taking one small step after another, always going downhill). If you really want to find the global minimum, you have to think globally. You have to apply analysis to the whole function, not just local parts of it, to find the best spot.
Great visualization and further explication for more visual learners. Love this type of comment on Lemmy where it’s to further discussion and help clarify.
Appreciate that now I can use “local minimum” in a correct way with people :D
They’re taught that the long run is simply a succession of short runs and that therefore short term and long term economic thinking and planning are the same,which is,of course, glaringly wrong.
Anything to fill the insatiable hole in them where a soul would be in a real human.
They constantly fall under fallacies of composition or aggregation. To think in the aggregate and long term is largely thrown under the rug.
It’s “right” for a single company to slash wages and gut employment to seek higher profit margins… But when every company does it, it ultimately destroys the capacity of the bottom to uphold the top and it collapses.
Yeah what you’re describing, in computerized maths, is called a “local minimum”.
When you’re seeking out a global minimum of a function, such as in this example:
You might be tempted to think “well, i start somewhere, then i take one small step after another, always going downhill, until i am at the lowest point”. But what happens in practice, is that you get stuck in so called “local minimums”. For a visualization:
That is the fundamental problem with being short-sighted (i.e., taking one small step after another, always going downhill). If you really want to find the global minimum, you have to think globally. You have to apply analysis to the whole function, not just local parts of it, to find the best spot.
Great visualization and further explication for more visual learners. Love this type of comment on Lemmy where it’s to further discussion and help clarify.
Appreciate that now I can use “local minimum” in a correct way with people :D