Martin Doucha
Jul 25, 2017 · 1 min read

Lots of people seem to think that the free market is some sort of infallible arbiter of public good for the sole reason that there is no central group of people setting its agenda. But even as a purely emergent system, it still has an agenda of its own: to maximize the volume of trade within the constraints of natural resources and labor supply. If people have to die in order to increase trade a little bit more, the market doesn’t give a damn. The analogy of paperclip maximizer is spot on.

I’ve been thinking for some time about looking at the economy from the perspective of a flow network and analyzing the economic effects of various graph structures. But I’ve been putting off sorting my thoughts and writing them down for ages because I’ll have to start by writing a primer in formal logic, graph theory and flow networks before I get to the main idea…

    Martin Doucha

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    Computer scientist, software developer and Pirate Party supporter