There is a repertoire of economic behavior organized around a concept of the Main Chance, an economic venue amenable to risky behavior that has the potential to payoff large in terms of becoming independently wealthy. This Machiavellian dynamic, calculating and cavalier, is the home range of linebacker mentality, that mentality which hunts gaps in products and services and prices that promise huge returns. It is arbitrage writ large. I call it the lottery economy.
There are huge numbers of people whose idea of any economy, capitalist or socialist, consists solely of variations on the theme of the lottery economy. This erroneous analytical frame is driven by the relentless hunt for efficiencies translated as productivity. Every single efficiency of process is a main chance, a lottery ticket. Any one improvement could have huge payoffs. In aggregate these improvements diminish the opportunity cost and increase the potential wealth of a closed system, a systemic payoff.
What we are finding out is that when we hunt efficiencies we hunt ourselves. We are about to create an Autonomous Machine Economy that excludes human participation. When I say 'about' I am speaking of a hundred years from now but the potential of that occurring is very large.
The constant disruption which characterizes economic behavior when hunting the main chance is neither intelligent nor wise. It constitutes a force of nature, a maelstrom, dragging human beings scratching and clawing from the realm of meaning into the Underworld. It is a profound limiting factor beyond the concept of Schumpeter. Left to run out of control society will collapse under the weight of innovation into some brutish variation.
It is either the main chance or us. There is a place for linebacking on the economic team but, in the truism, there is no 'I' in team.
Do Well and Be Well.
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