‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains
I&#x27;ve been thinking about this a lot. In terms of political economy, there&#x27;s a lot of reliance on the ideas of information, free will and rationality.<p>To cut a long story short, if people have information about the market, they can use their knowledge of their own desires to act, which creates some sort of efficiency. Glossing over a load of stuff here because it&#x27;s a large subject, but that&#x27;s sort of the spiel you get when people are talking about all sorts of political&#x2F;economic decisions. And you can generate both leftie and rightie policies depending on how you think about things.<p>The problem is if deciding things depends on free will and information, what do we do when it seems there are exceptions? I&#x27;ll leave aside information problems since we&#x27;re more talking about rationality.<p>But if it turns out people can know what WoW does to your studies, and they still end up doing this, how should we think about this? Easy answer is that their real desire is to play WoW all day, but that doesn&#x27;t seem very satisfying. If they&#x27;re making an irrational decision, that has other consequences on our society.<p>For instance, a whole load of behaviours need to be controlled. Obvious things like smoking and drugs, but what about overeating? Too much soda? Social media? And what exactly is the correct policy response to irrational behaviour? Keep in mind solutions like taxes&#x2F;subsidies also rely on rationality.