Is most of the economy transaction costs?
I was learning about the economist Ronald Coase and a topic he focused on: transaction costs.
A person in a video described how businesses and technology help lower transaction costs. The person used Amazon.com as an example, pointing out it takes less time to search the marketplace and buy what someone wants.
My experience is different. When I look up what people buy most on Amazon.com, a lot of it is stuff that won’t improve the life of the buyer before ending up in a landfill. In my conversation with Lorna Davis after she stopped shopping Amazon after taking my sustainability leadership workshop, she saved time and money. She didn’t think she was wasting time or money. She probably thought she was saving them by shopping at Amazon despite achieving the opposite. I doubt she was unique.
If we rarely want what we buy from Amazon, or whole industries, we just buy things because they figured out how to motivate us, what’s going on?
I suggest we want most in interactions with others to acquire life’s necessities, like water, food, shelter, love, support, and such. Even when we’re buying trinkets and doof, we want to improve our health, connection, love, support, and such. Instead, Amazon and peers are making acquiring what we value harder.
Is the economy all transaction costs between people enjoying time together, getting abundant food from nature, health, security, safety?
What if transaction costs become so great that they lead to mutually beneficial transactions not occurring? Amazon was cited as lowering transaction costs between book sellers and buyers, but if we understand our goal in interacting as satisfaction and Silicon Valley business model as finding motivations and manipulating motivational system to crave it, Amazon is creating transaction costs, as are entire industries.
If we want to satisfy basic motivations and buying from them moves us further from these goals, they increase transaction costs.
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