In this part we will explore what this holds for economics and how it relates to economic activity, for my finance interested audience.
Markets as such don't exist, pure and simple. What we call a market, is just an aggregation of people trading voluntarily in their best interest. It's just voluntarism in action, people interacting with eachother peacefully.
Just as a forest doesn't exist, there are only trees, in fact trees are just a collection atoms, or you might even break up atoms into smaller particles, but more on this later... (in future parts of the series)
The fact is, you can say that humans don't exist either, only cells, or the atoms within, but I would argue that a human is a more accurate description of "matter" than a cell, since it has way more functions than an individual cell, and does more things.
So the individual is the basis of human society, not the cells of their body. A human is at the core of society, and "society" is just a word that groups people in that category. So a market is just a word that groups people into a category based on their trading and engagements in a particular industry / economic sector.
Perhaps the subjective relativity cannot be more obvious than in the currency markets. Each currency is relative in value to other currencies, which are subsequently relative to the rest, and their users's feelings. How obvious is that?
It's impossible to determine the absolute value of something, but nontheless people try. The market provides a pretty accurate valuation system, but it's still relative, so you have to aggregate the data from all markets to compare your asset to it, in order to establish a somewhat absolute value.
Take the USD for example, there is something called the Dollar Index, that tries to give the dollar an objective, absolute value:
But it still depends on other currencies, and the confidence/perception of those currencies' users. An asset is only worth as much as the highest BID order. So if the international community doesn't buy USD, then the USD is worthless. There is no objective value in the currency, it's worth only as much as other people perceive it to be. And there is of course the inflation thing, but that is another topic.
You might think that a gold standard is objective, but it's not. It's the same thing, the 1 $ = 1 ounce is absolute, but the uncertainty is introduced in gold's value itself. You can fix the peg between a currency and gold, but then all you do is just shift the valuation burden to gold, which is still subjective, it's decided by all gold users, and subsequently by the rest of the people.
Of course you might say that gold is pretty solid and has "objective value", since humans use it for thousands of years. But that doesn't prove objectivity either. That only proves Persistence, as explained in the first article:
Well they actually don't prove Objectivity, they only prove Persistence, there is a major difference between objective things and persistent subjective things.
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Ok gold was useful for humanity, but can you guarantee that it will be useful in 1 billion years too? Especially if we perfect particle accelerator technology that will just transform Mercury into Gold. There is absolutely no objective value in gold, and the persistence can fade away after technology makes it obsolete.
So creating objectivity in financial markets is like building a castle on shifting sand. It doesn't matter how you peg things, if the base is falling apart and the uncertainty makes the entire structure unstable over longterm.
It is best to view it with a subjective perspective, because everything else just doesn't make sense. Bitcoin doesn't have any objective value (or let's say intrinsic value). It can just as well have been Litecoin or Dogecoin, but the people have chosen Bitcoin for various reasons. There is no divine commandment that divinely selected Bitcoin, it was just how people felt and decided at that particular time. It was all voluntary.
Sources:
https://pixabay.com
https://memegenerator.net
