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.