BONUS EPISODE: Economic Laws #24-33 | Hn 282

Adam Haman (0:07)

Hello there, and welcome to a very special subscribers-only episode of Haman Nature. I am Adam Haman, and that sick-looking porcupine fella there is my buddy Tyrone.

You look a little under the weather, my friend.

SPEAKER_2 (0:22)

Yeah, recovering from a little bit of a cold or something, but the show must go on.

Adam Haman (0:29)

I have great news. They say Western medicine is broken, and I think that's true. But I think we can all agree that this here is medicine, this here copy of Hunter Lewis' Economics In Three Lessons that you and I go through because we're gluttons for something.

Are you ready to power through some more lessons?

SPEAKER_2 (0:55)

Yeah. So, Adam, do you feel like the cost that our paid viewers pay to see this bonus content is a fair price?

Adam Haman (1:10)

Well, all I can say for sure after decades of studying economics is that prices and value are completely different things. Value is subjective, as they say. And I'd like to think that as much as we value the money that we get for these paid subscriptions, I'd like to think that the people who pay it value our content even more, and the warm feeling they have in their tummies from financially supporting a show that they enjoy.

SPEAKER_2 (1:43)

That's a good point, because honestly, you can't put a price on Haman Nature.

Adam Haman (1:49)

That's true. We've tried. You literally can't do it.

SPEAKER_2 (1:55)

All right. So we're talking about, we're in the next, what do you call it, category of the economic laws that Hunter Lewis lays out here, and this is the law of prices. So like with the other laws, there are sublaws or corollaries, as he calls them, to the main law.

So we're gonna, like we did in the last episode, we're not gonna read through it word for word, except for the last law. I want to read word for word, just because I feel like that one's really important. But we're gonna kind of summarize and discuss some key points. So are you ready to review the law of prices?

Adam Haman (2:41)

I'm ready to review the law of prices. Let's go.

SPEAKER_2 (2:44)

All right, cool. So this is Economic Law No. 24, the law of prices.

If we wish to cooperate on a voluntary basis, we must have shared, workable, flexible prices. Okay.

Adam Haman (2:59)

Yeah.

SPEAKER_2 (3:00)

So that's not immediately obvious. So it's not one of these tautologies that, um, you know, the the Massessian Austrian School of Economics often uses as a foundation. So this is definitely, you know, building upon a foundation. Um, and I, and I underlined one passage here, um, that I'll just read and then we can sort of spitball after that. And, and one section he writes, prices allow us to exchange goods and services in ever widening circles.

If we live on a self-sufficient, self-sufficient manner, as in middle-age Europe, we do not need prices to make exchanges. So in, in that way, it becomes obvious when you, when you, when you think about it like that, as you drink your coffee.

Adam Haman (3:54)

Boy, I didn't expect that to be the end of the sentence, my friend. I thought for sure you had another two or three to follow.

Yeah, we're going to get in more details in a little more of these corollaries. But right off the bat, the more you learn about prices and what they do for an economy, the more it looks magical, glorious. It's like when people look in the cosmos and the universe and study the laws of physics, and many people, very poetically, scientists even say they see the hand of God in the order that they see on display there.

SPEAKER_2 (4:30)

Right.

Adam Haman (4:30)

And that's why they tend to look for simplifying, unifying rules to explain it, because they keep finding them.

SPEAKER_2 (4:36)

Yeah.

Adam Haman (4:37)

And prices, I mean, it's a little bit of self-serving to the species to say so. But prices, when I see how much work they do and how simple they are and how elegant, it feels the same way.

The amount of coordination and understanding of the world, like deep insights about the scarcity of resources, the availability of labor, the valuations of hundreds, if not millions of consumers, all that stuff is encoded into a price. And so you are able to act in an intelligent way, as if you had all that localized knowledge distributed across the globe. And all you need for this to work is that force and fraud be kept out of the system and prices be honest. And it's the interplay of coordination that comes bottom up, emergent from that is just a glorious thing to behold.