Bicycle Thief Economics
Tears Soak Out the Science of Value.
Geoffrey Hamilton
January 10, 2002
In the famous
Italian film The Bicycle Thief the father character momentarily
gives up looking for his all-important stolen bike in order to live it
up a little by taking his son to a restaurant. Soon he notices
how poor he is compared to the other diners and gets depressed.
How is it that he is poor and others are rich? This is the basic
question in economics. The answer provided by the gamegene theory
is helpful.
Economics is an area of study which has lead some to marxism and
others to thatcherism and still others, like Mao. to various
kinds of social experiments. Yet where is the science in all of this?
How is it that something like economics, which claims the mantel of a science,
could produce so little scientific material? One reason is that
this science like all the others allows ethics to limit its scope. But
ethics is economics and is recognized
as such by many people since the time of Aristotle. Really economics is the study of
values just as ethics is. The difference today seems to be the false
categorization of both into unthinkable relationships.
This makes science even more difficult to apply to value, the most subjective of studies.
Secondly, science puts itself above other routes to knowledge and
it ignores the general use of common strategies and
tactics which often openly involve game concepts - game theory being
one example. This being a symptom of the wider observable fact that
every action in science follows the same formula as found in all games.
So science is a game, but only one of many, so when economics cannot
use science it goes on to using other games, and less rigorous ones perhaps, and these methods are
so obviously ill conceived people put no faith in them, and so we are still wondering today why
there are rich and poor.
The game gene theory answers this question in many ways. First, equality is impossible. There is nothing
identical in nature so rich and poor is just one way of being. Games do not decide rank or equality but
they do decide who gets something of value and that's all that needs to be done in nature. Games decide value, create value, have value and divide value. Not everybody
can get everything at the same time either. Equality is just a very silly concept.
Secondly, the poor man with his
son is vastly richer than many others in the world and he knows it - when he thinks of it - but
his game in the cafe in the film is to compare with the others he chooses to look at. It is his own fault
that he is 'poor' at that moment in a way that he wasn't before he walked in.
Thirdly, he imagined everything in order to feel bad. He
chose to imagine these people were happy and that they weren't also using their last lira for a
moment of pleasure, as he was, in a generally horrible existence. So his envy was completely
self serving. He was able to eat there and from all appearances, on that score, they were all equal.
These are just some of the ways gamegene theory offers answers to
economics questions. But when anyone answers the question of value, whether
it is through ethics, politics or economics, it is by their own games and through their
own unobservable and undramatized existence.
GH
Economics
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