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The guardian reports on a sobering event in Washington DC.
US police have arrested a man wielding an assault rifle who entered a pizza restaurant that was the target of fake news reports it was operating a child abuse ring led by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her top campaign aide.
[...] The suspect entered the restaurant and pointed a gun at a restaurant employee, who fled and notified authorities, police said. The man then discharged the weapon inside the restaurant. There were no injuries.
[...] [Police] said the suspect during an interview with investigators revealed that he came to the establishment to "self-investigate" Pizzagate, the police statement said. Pizzagate is a baseless conspiracy, which falsely claims Clinton and her campaign chief John Podesta were running a child sex ring from the restaurant's backrooms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @12:07AM
They defined economics as:
The study of how (society) allocates their limited resources to satisfy their unlimited wants
It took me a while to figure out what was wrong with that statement. Our wants are not unlimited because having unlimited wants would require infinite mental capacity.
I'm not sure why you think that would be required. Certainly if you take "unlimited wants" to mean an infinitely large number of desires, it would take infinite mental capacity to enumerate them. But "unlimited" can mean more than one thing; instead of interpreting it as "an infinitely long list of desires" (which is obviously foolish, so I assume you're not doing it), we should probably assume it refers to the magnitude of each individual desire, i.e. we cannot state any finite quantity of resources, such that every "want" of (any member of) society can be fulfilled by that quantity of resources.
If you give everybody a Trek starship, somebody will want at least two (one to fly around in, one to blow up!). Give everyone a solar system, and somebody will want his name spelled out in supernovae. Give everyone a universe, and somebody wants a universe and a pony. Thinking of these examples certainly didn't take mental capacity proportional to the ludicrosity of the wants in question, because we're just manipulating symbols, and the symbol for the universe is no larger or harder to handle than the symbol for a starship.
Our wants are subject to the "law of diminishing returns" just like everything else.
I'm not sure you understand the law of diminishing returns; it applies specifically to a production process with multiple inputs, and says that when holding all but one input steady, and increasing that input, you will eventually get lower output per unit of that input. As an example, inputs could be workers (labor) and drill presses (capital) -- if you have 5 workers, and 10 drill presses, adding another worker might increase productivity 20%, but eventually (somewhere around 10-20 workers, depending on how much time is spent actually drilling widgets, vs. sharpening drills, handling raw and finished widgets, etc.), you stop seeing proportional increases in output. (Notably, the law does not say that at some point you will necessarily see a net decrease, or even no net increase -- just that the net increase will be less than proportional, and thus that the money spent on the last worker would have been more profitably put towards an additional drill press.)
I'm struggling to apply this to the idea of unlimited wants... All I can think of is that you're considering desire as one input to a process, whose output is... personal satisfaction (I guess?), and suggesting that increasing one's desires will eventually lead to decreased satisfaction per want. I'm not sure that model is particularly helpful or valid, but assuming it is, it still doesn't indicate that wants are limited. After all, if the other inputs to that process come from the "limited resources", and thus cannot be increased when it would be economically optimal to do so, your only option is to increase the one input that is not fixed, and accept the increase in output you get, even though that increase is less than proportional.
Alternatively, if you're considering wants to be the output of a production process (and I have no clue what resources you imagine as inputs), the law of diminishing returns only suggests that increasing one input out of balance with the rest will have decreasing per-unit yield in wants. But that doesn't imply decreasing total wants, and it doesn't apply at all if all inputs are increased together.
If you do understand the law properly, and didn't mean to apply it in either of those ways, I guess you'll have to explain what you did mean, because I'm stumped.