I’m putting up today’s blog a little early because we are taking off this afternoon for our summer vacation. We’ll camp out tonight and arrive somewhere along the shore of beautiful Lago di Garda in Italy tomorrow afternoon. We’ll spend a week there and then stop in Geneva, Switzerland, where the Higgs Boson was recently discovered (but that’s not the reason we’re visiting Geneva, my brother actually lives there) for a couple of days on the way back.
Lago di Garda
I hope this doesn’t cause any interruptions to the blog, I expect we’ll have internet access pretty much everywhere we go, but if the blog gets interrupted for a few days, you’ll know the reason why.
So, a random thought that popped into my head this morning: Evolution (as theorized by Darwin) has some similarity to the invisible free hand of the marketplace (as theorized by Adam Smith, and preached by teabaggers as if it were actually a desirable thing).
Where there is a demand, it will be filled. In the free market, there is a demand for food and housing and luxury goods and the demand will persist until someone comes along and fills it. In evolution, there is a demand for food, and those who can’t fulfill that demand die out and do not reproduce.
In both cases, an equilibrium is eventually established. It’s that qualifying word, “eventually,” that bothers me. Human evolution, through millenia of starvation, disease and, for the last hundred thousand years or so at least, warfare, has left us with the form we enjoy today, these bodies that itch, ache, wear out and sometimes have problems with waste disposal and other mechanical failures.
The invisible hand of the free market eventually establishes an equilibrium wherein people get the products they desire and those who produce them best get rich, but along the way there is a lot of deprivation and a lot of people who aren’t really very good at capitalism get left in the dirt.
Both are systems which could be described as “working” as long as your criteria for a working system are limited to bare survival (for some).
In both cases, we could do a lot better. I hope that eventually we will.
Have a great day. I’ll write late tomorrow night from Italy.
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