Sometimes here on ~econ, we deal with serious topics in quite some depth.

Sometimes Den launches Denstravaganzas with semi-questionable content -- sometimes it's quite low level, full of snark. Today, it's hidden economic lessons from the worst possible places: the internet.

• To strawman something is to take a weak version of an opponent's argument and crush it.
• To steelman something is to take the strongest possible version of an opponent's argument... and crush that.

In this post I'm going to airman(?) something, i.e., extract some economic insight #809392 from something the opponent didn't really argue or meant (well, who knows...)

1: Fungibility in the feminized boob job domain1: Fungibility in the feminized boob job domain

Here is, not exactly the world's most intellectually impressive human

• Money in = 1) parents' gift, 2) shake-down of sugar daddies
• Money out = 1) real estate license, 2) boob job.

I mean, you can use some mental accounting and pretend that no, actually, dudes paid for your real estate license and parents fixed up your boobs, but it's the same goddamn thing.

Even if you literally received and paid for the two services you acquired with separate bank accounts (sugar daddy Venmo'd, you Venmo'd real estate; parents sent dollars to your Chase bank account, paid for tits with Chase bank card),

IT'S THE SAME THINGIT'S THE SAME THING

Fungibility, lady. It's a hard word, I get it; but it's an important word. And misunderstanding it means you misunderstand the monetary world you live in (#1467656). Good for you, tho, boobs look great.

2: The zero-sum mentality and betting markets2: The zero-sum mentality and betting markets

Here's a dude who does not understand zero-sum games.

Look, you can pretend financial markets are zero sum if you want (and if you have the mental acuity of a six-year-old) but they're just not: investments -> capital available for risk-taking -> enhanced production -> higher productivity, translating into higher wages/profits = we all get richer and better off. The fact that one trade in isolation is a zero-sum (negative if accounting for broker fees and slippage) doesn't mean that the entire system itself is zero-sum. (Yes, yes, Undisc: if betting markets were huge and liquid and people _actually_ used them for hedging risks, this argument would apply there too. They're not. I win.)

Second, so a pure betting market (without fees) would have been a zero-sum game, too. Setting up a betting house with a 5% take is not zero sum; it's the most obvious negative-sum game there is, also known as a Casino. Jezus, beluga.

Betting markets is just the right-wing equivalent of environmentalism. Same brainrot, same stupidity.

Me, you, take. Negative worldview; regulate, destroy, squander.

3 Opportunity cost of wasted efforts3 Opportunity cost of wasted efforts

Tying this all together with some actual reading: Zero-sum worldview (inability to understand what is and isn't fungible...? I confess it's a stretch...) is LITERALLY what's destroying our civilization.

Because prediction markets are mostly zero sum (#1480442) -- and up until they're routinely used to hedging real-life, value-improving activities (=insurance) rather than, like, betting on the latest Knicks game or whether some CEO mentions a word or bitcoin hit $x -- they're not building a better future. That means, whatever demographic and technological drag face us (#1476033) become that much harder to deal with when society's best and brightest are wasting their time and brainpower playing tricks.

We know and see this in Bitcoinland... what if all the treasury company twats had been building instead of parasiting?

Notes from a book I haven't reviewed yet, but I'm surprisingly astonished by:

p. 92: in a static economic environment, zero-sum, you can only get ahead by taking away from someone else; labor can only increase its incomes by extracting share from profits or lower taxes.

“Scarcity thinking kicks off a self-reinforcing doom loop, which results in more scarcity.”“Scarcity thinking kicks off a self-reinforcing doom loop, which results in more scarcity.”

When we approach lower growth, a more elderly society (fuck the boomers), a more risk-averse mentality, all manner of bad downstream consequences follow -- including a brain drain of people into zero-sum activities:

Authors invoke this gigantic NBER survey study

We find that a more zero-sum mindset is strongly associated with more support for government redistribution, race- and gender-based affirmative action, and more restrictive immigration policies. Zero-sum thinking can be traced back to the experiences of both the individual and their ancestors, encompassing factors such as the degree of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, whether they immigrated to the United States or lived in a location with more immigrants,

SOCIOLOGICAL explanation for why low growth, thus zero-sum environments, fucks with our choices: risk aversion shoots up, ambitious people go into rent-seeking industries instead of (literal) moonshots or tinkering. We bet our depreciating moneys on Polymarket instead of investing in growing businesses that increase economic growth and improve the lot of all.

I dunno, man, it'd be better if we understood fungibility, zero-sum, and had a better intellectual environmentI dunno, man, it'd be better if we understood fungibility, zero-sum, and had a better intellectual environment

Tl;dr, Den just embodied the "someone is wrong on the internet" meme. Have a fun Saturday, econ pals