I've been through a LOT of college education. Forcing myself back to college education again and again was...unfortunate for me, and very wasteful of time and money. I'm sure that the shades of my parents are profoundly disappointed with how little practical value I got in return for all that college. The thing is, though...I found that I could rouse up a powerful interest in just about any subject I ever tried, in college. Thanks to this or that college class, I daydreamed at least briefly about a lot of possible careers—filmmaking, microbiology, chemical engineering...heck, I even entertained laughable thoughts about going into pure mathematics and (heaven help me) into medicine because I was enlivened by some class that I was taking.
And then...there was "economics". I never succeeded even in finishing a single attempt at taking an "Economics 101" sort of class, and I remember feeling guilty about that in fact. Wasn't it good to know how money works? I tried to tell myself. Wouldn't it be useful to have some understanding of "business"? But instead I developed a profound aversion to the subject, long before I developed any political understanding of why the subject of "economics" is such a poisonous one in a society built around capitalism.
I've had a curious intuition—at least, I've imagined that I've had this feeling—that tells me when something I'm reading is largely devoid of meaning. It's like a sixth sense for marketing-speak, you could say. That's roughly the feeling I remember from trying to read a freshman-level "economics" textbook. I could tell that I wasn't reading something on the same informative level as (say) a freshman biology or chemistry textbook. There were equations of a sort, but they seemed arbitrary to me—assertions without solid foundation, condensed into something resembling an algebraic expression, as if the mathematical relationships that purportedly governed money, not to mention all the nebulous abstractions like "demand" and "inflation" of which economists are so fond, rested on the same solid physical basis as the Ideal Gas Law or the inverse-square law of gravitation. A good chemistry textbook, however, explains how chemists slowly pieced together the Ideal Gas Law from experimentation on gases; the laws of "economics" are simply asserted to be true. This is how money works: take it or leave it.
That brings me to one of the sacred idols of money-seeking culture: the compound-interest curve, of which I've supplied a typical illustration.
This is probably one of the first things you're taught in Econ 101, in fact. There are probably millions of human beings who believe that money simply...does this, of its own accord, like a radioactive sample decaying of its own accord according to an exponential law. It's The Rules™ of money. "Everyone" knows that money compounds like this. The curve of money points upwards towards the infinite; if you want to get rich, just wait, and your money will "grow" because that's the laws of economics.
There's just one little problem with this: money doesn't need to behave like this at all. Money only exhibits the behavior it does because we've socially defined "money" and the rules of its exchange. The compound-interest curve is purely arbitrary; indeed it's possible to imagine a society that forbids the collection of interest. (There used to be some Christian notion that all interest-collection was "usury" and a sin, but these days Christians are far more enthusiastic money-hoarders.) But we inhabit a society that has built countless institutions and laws and corporate practices around enforcing an exponential growth curve for money. It's been like that for as long as any human being has been alive on Earth today. The "laws of economics" have been compulsory in the West for as long as anyone remembers.
I wasn't able to articulate such discontents when I was a college student in 199x. All I knew was that the textbook seemed to read like a sales brochure and the graphs and formulae didn't connect up with anything real in my head, so I just bounced off "economics". Every time I took an undergrad econ class I wound up dropping it, and I never took any "business" classes despite getting the occasional hint that it might be useful for my professional career after college.
Now it seems more like bullshit than ever, but...is there any way to avoid swimming in it anyway?
~Chara of Pnictogen