The Demise of the Local
For a very long time, I used to get my weekly entertainment from the comics shop just down the road. Advice and opinions were free, and you could easily meet old friends and fellow regulars. The food in the area wasn't bad either.
One day, no explanations, they went down. Insolvent, I guess.
Local expertise, whether pharmaceutical or literary, is always trumped in the long run by mass-production and huge operations which are financially cost-effective. That's the way of the world.
The paradox is that because humans are rational people, we will indeed do what is less than best for ourselves. That's because most humans will go for the good of the short term rather than the best of the long term. A bird in the hand, as they say, is worth two in the bush.
This is why the world is the way it is. Banks and similar institutions created short-term profit instruments based on long-term fantasies. Rational humans went for them. There was just enough to cover short-term rationality, like the lure at the end of a very long fishing-rod.
Our experiences with the long-term, however, are seldom encouraging. After all, you could die before you get to the end of the line. That's why humans are only rational with respect to the kinds of payout you get when you can see the end of the line — that's why people will sacrifice the life they will likely lose anyway when it will save more lives, and that's why you get deathbed conversions.
And that's why the local mum-and-pop shops down the road will just keep failing unless they find themselves a truly integral niche in the local ecology, one that provides benefits for many without particularly high overheads and with sufficient profit to continue, one day at a time, regardless of trend. Something like professional tuition, maybe.
One day, no explanations, they went down. Insolvent, I guess.
Local expertise, whether pharmaceutical or literary, is always trumped in the long run by mass-production and huge operations which are financially cost-effective. That's the way of the world.
The paradox is that because humans are rational people, we will indeed do what is less than best for ourselves. That's because most humans will go for the good of the short term rather than the best of the long term. A bird in the hand, as they say, is worth two in the bush.
This is why the world is the way it is. Banks and similar institutions created short-term profit instruments based on long-term fantasies. Rational humans went for them. There was just enough to cover short-term rationality, like the lure at the end of a very long fishing-rod.
Our experiences with the long-term, however, are seldom encouraging. After all, you could die before you get to the end of the line. That's why humans are only rational with respect to the kinds of payout you get when you can see the end of the line — that's why people will sacrifice the life they will likely lose anyway when it will save more lives, and that's why you get deathbed conversions.
And that's why the local mum-and-pop shops down the road will just keep failing unless they find themselves a truly integral niche in the local ecology, one that provides benefits for many without particularly high overheads and with sufficient profit to continue, one day at a time, regardless of trend. Something like professional tuition, maybe.
Labels: Economics
etched with acid at 8:51:00 am
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