Economics as a verb

Rehash of Economics As A Verb, modified for current relevance.

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We get locked into booms and busts, inflations and deflations, because we forget that our measuring unit is only a measure. In Alan Watts’s famous metaphor, a carpenter wouldn’t stop work because he “ran out of inches”, so we shouldn’t stop work because we “ran out of dollars” or “ran out of liquidity”. The Soviet system made this shortage impossible because it created more money when the amount of real value increased, not when some asshole’s Dow Dick got longer.

Modern bankers have developed a monstrous structure of pure units depending on other pure units depending on other pure units, losing all possible contact with any actual underlying value. Options are literally and explicitly bets on the value of numbers, identical to the operation of a football pool.

[2026 UPDATE: And now we have football pools directly driving assassinations and arsons.]

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At its origin, economics seemed to understand this distinction. Early Catholic and Islamic thinkers saw labor as the key component of value. Islam went farther, declaring that any attempt to place value on abstract numbers (i.e. paying interest) is a sort of idolatry.

I’m proposing one more step. Treat everything as activities instead of things. Treat everything as animate, a way of creating duty and beauty. Why is a carpenter worth money? Because he works for you, doing things you can’t or won’t do. Why is a car worth money? Because it works for you, doing things you can’t or won’t do.

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This would not lead to a different set of economic equations. Instead, it would simply eliminate the whole fraudulent notion that you can condense human behavior into a closed-form equation.

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I can imagine a few specific consequences at the moment:

(1) Delegitimize statistics. Don’t use stats for any important purpose. Stats are designed to remove the time element and the relational element, leading to all sorts of evil thinking. Wave-type analysis represents the verbs of reality much better, but still doesn’t capture the transitivity of verbs.

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(2) Delegitimize idolatry of numbers. If you want to bet on something, you should do it in a clearly illegitimate environment. Currently we have a weird disjunction between two rackets: Betting on numbers related to stocks is run by the NYC Mafia, with total governmental approval and assistance. Betting on numbers related to sports is run by other Mafias with no pretense of legitimacy. Under the present system, if you lose your shirt betting on stock numbers, Ben ‘Bugsy’ Bernanke will make up your losses and give you a few trillion as reward; but if you lose your shirt betting on horse numbers, Guido ‘Lefty’ Salvatore or Ernest ‘Two Dogs’ Runs-with-bear will break your legs. We should put Lefty and Two Dogs in charge of stock-based betting as well. Much more efficient and honest.

[2026 UPDATE: Well, they predictably did the opposite! Instead of treating stock bets the Mafia way, they moved Mafia bets inside the stock market through Polymarket!]

(3) In foreign trade, treat labor and stuff on the same plane. Impose tariffs on stuff that comes from China, AND impose tariffs on labor performed in India, AND impose tariffs on laborers brought in from Mexico.

[2026 UPDATE: Trump is halfway moving in this direction by imposing more tariffs. But he’s not balancing the industrial equation by subsidizing real manufacturing here.]

(4) In general try to think like Nature. Nature loves negative feedback and decentralized operation. In shaping an economy, encourage closed loops and discourage loopless control. Encourage direct ownership of companies, discourage shareholder ownership. Henry Ford showed us how to balance a transitive equation. Pay workers enough to buy the cars they build, and buy materials from farmers who buy our cars. Discourage outsourcing of labor and capital. Encourage smaller units with minimal coupling. Discourage giant corporations and giant governments.

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There’s no such thing as matter, no such thing as particles. It’s all energy and waves. It’s all work and duty and beauty. We should value it accordingly. Furniture consists of the photosynthetic labor of trees, improved by the intelligent labor of humans; and furniture serves us with its own labor by giving us rest or helping us to cook. We should value it highly. Stocks and derivatives and “swaps” are pure numbers. We should consider them worthless and counterfeit, and punish anyone who attempts to use them.