Aesthetic Materialism

      Paradise Lost   In the final episode of "Lost," we find out that, in fact, all of the passengers and crew of Flight 815 died in the crash, instantly.  They are all, already dead.  So this "island," upon which most of the action of the show has been taken place, never existed in reality - it was a kind of illusion, or dream.  Or, better yet, the island does exist, but in a reality that is, in a sense, more real than our reality.  You see, "Lost" was a religious allegory, or perhaps not an allegory, but a very explicitly religious story, and the stories it tells are stories of an afterlife - with the possibility of something like the traditional concepts of salvation or damnation. Within this illusion, dream, alternate reality, or what have you (movie? television show?), some of the passengers of of Flight 815 died instantly, whereas others died in the subsequent days and months.  Why is that?  Because many of the people who died i...

Austrian economists - and others, with a similarly simplistic understanding of markets - operate under the unthought assumption that humans are rational maximizers, and if given the opportunity to negotiate deals, will inevitably choose to do that which is in their own best interest. But humans are not always rational, and human institutions are not always rational.  This is not only due to quirks of our neurological make-up: even theoretically perfectly rational agents may behave in ways that are ultimately contrary to their own interests, thus, in a sense, irrational.  This is one of the key insights of game theory. One famous example is the " prisoner's dilemma ," which shows that even when people are rationally doing that which is in their own best interest, nonetheless, this can inevitably produce a result that is in no one's best interest.  Then there's Newcomb's problem - after considering it for a while, many people come to the conclusion that there m...