OK, I think I was misunderstood and also tired and phrased things poorly. Game theory itself is not a bad thing; it is somewhat like a knife, or a nuke. It has no intrinsic morality, but the things it seems to tend to be used for, for several reasons, wind up being things that eject negative externalities like crazy.
Yes, but this seems to be most egregious when you advocate letting millions of people starve because the precious Market might be upset.
Besides the fact that maximizing a non-Friendly function leads to horrible results (whether the system being maximized is the Market, the Party, the Church, or… whatever), what exactly are you trying to say? Do you think that markets create more horrible results than those other options? Do you have any specific evidence for that? In that case it would be probably better to discuss the specific thing, before moving to a wide generalization.
I have no idea how the Holodomor is germane to this discussion.
The observation being made, I believe, is that the most prominent examples in the 20th century of mass death due to famine were caused by economic and political systems very far from the Austrian school economics. There’s a longish list of mass starvation due to Communist governments.
Is there an example of Austrian economists giving advice that led to a major famine, or that would have led to famine? I cannot offhand think of an example of anybody advocating “letting millions of people starve because the precious Market might be upset.”
OK, I think I was misunderstood and also tired and phrased things poorly. Game theory itself is not a bad thing; it is somewhat like a knife, or a nuke. It has no intrinsic morality, but the things it seems to tend to be used for, for several reasons, wind up being things that eject negative externalities like crazy.
Yes, but this seems to be most egregious when you advocate letting millions of people starve because the precious Market might be upset.
Who precisely are you thinking of, who advocated allowing mass starvation for this reason?
Millions of people did starve for reasons completely opposed to free markets.
Besides the fact that maximizing a non-Friendly function leads to horrible results (whether the system being maximized is the Market, the Party, the Church, or… whatever), what exactly are you trying to say? Do you think that markets create more horrible results than those other options? Do you have any specific evidence for that? In that case it would be probably better to discuss the specific thing, before moving to a wide generalization.
I have no idea how the Holodomor is germane to this discussion.
The observation being made, I believe, is that the most prominent examples in the 20th century of mass death due to famine were caused by economic and political systems very far from the Austrian school economics. There’s a longish list of mass starvation due to Communist governments.
Is there an example of Austrian economists giving advice that led to a major famine, or that would have led to famine? I cannot offhand think of an example of anybody advocating “letting millions of people starve because the precious Market might be upset.”
You said “letting millions of people starve”.
There were not that many cases of millions of people starving during the last hundred years.
Yes.
I suspect you’re looking at it with a rather biased view.
Sigh. You made a cobman—one constructed of mud and straw. Congratulations.