We Have Been Talking about Imperfect Information
A decision maker who takes an action if and only if the marginal benefit of the action exceeds the marginal cost. (Mankiw)
A graph that shows the various combinations of output that an economy can possibly produce given the amount of resources it has available and the current production technology firms use to transform those inputs into outputs. (Mankiw)
Econoland produces widgets at the rate of 100 per day and the Republic of Poetry produces poems at a fluctuating rate heavily dependent on the weather and certain unknown factors.
& I am tired now. We have been arguing
over whether transactions
without cost frictionless
gliding exchanges between rational pairs of people
defined by whether they want to buy or sell widgets is a thing
we could ever hope to
encounter outside
experimental conditions (& even then).
We have been studying
curves like none I want on my body:
indifference, income-consumption, labor-leisure, & then
we moved on to production
possibility frontiers, & I want all
these terms I’ve underlined to molt their textbooks definitions
& itch to grow noisy again. Don’t let’s waste
each other’s lifetime solving for how to be
indifferent. Can we not
only consume but be exuberant, not only toil
but excavate fear: nothing needs
to be the opposite of each other, and if you wanted
this to be a battlefield, why? I saw a plaque
the size of a food truck embedded in a sidewalk in Buenos Aires
teaching tourists how to dance
the tango, the steps numbered
possibilities running one through eight, you
don’t have to know them already. We could reach out
our headlights to greet frontiers, the mouth
of its river opening
into the vowels of currents, sediment with
secrets not divulged except to
unsuspecting toes. Will you notice that our eyes
are these flat things with barely
any curvature, horizons
we carry? Delight & dread
project in every direction, we take
them in and still we are uncommitted
to the orthodoxy of any given hue. There are not only two
goods in this world, two countries cunningly
trading themselves into a bigger pie
& fewer people with pie, fewer bears with pie,
whole forests of pieless trees, an emergency drought
of pieless lakes, mountains with their innards
blown out but no pie. I haven’t had
a rational thought in months. Have you? Please, go
ahead and model what you’ve been taught,
what information I have is what
I’ve gathered, it is imperfect,
so be it: I know this spiky trembling thing I have
held in every cavity of mine has too many
dimensions for even all the computers
in all the clouds to render.