Oddbean new post about login | logout Aha! A baking tale without parallels to any economy i would be familiar with. Just what i was looking for! 😊
Everyone loves food. And I'm hoping to be edgy, by causing the anti-grain police to meltdown in the replies. I didn't go full seed-oil, tho. Stuck to the less emotionally-laden olives.
Yeah, its odd how often its best to __hint__ that the house __may__ be on a shaky ground rather than point out that not only is there a weak & corroding foundation, the walls are on fire and that they're inhaling smokey mold every day 😅
I think it's basic economic illiteracy driving the problem. People think communism is when you have one producer, but it's when you have one customer. It's a centrally-planned, single-payer system. If you have one producer, but lots of customers, market forces can cause competitors to arise, if the customers are unhappy with the products. If you have one customer and lots of producers, the customer will find it simpler to just pick one or two producers and focus on them, and the other producers go away. The producers that survive can then become decreasingly productive, without losing market share. And the clearest sign of communism is when the producers regularly declare that things are impossible, that aren't even improbable. That are, in fact, perfectly normal and simple things to do.
Basically, you don't get the most innovation by dumping enormous amounts of money on innovators. You get it by forcing innovators to literally hunt down individual customers and try to solve any problem that they might be having, even if those customers don't even realize that it might be a problem. Once they have a solution to a problem, they can then market that solution to more potential customers and maybe make some money off of it. This doesn't work, if they all only have the same customer.