The Economics of Knowledge and Desire

Poverty is an opportunity. Lack is precisely what drives us to act. If you feel poor right now, that is truly an opportunity, because it means you can sense a gap. Whatever that gap may be, once you feel it, you start looking for a way—through YouTube, books, people, whatever it takes. If you keep focusing on that gap, it is only a matter of time before your condition changes. The problem is that poor people tend to cluster together and fail to notice the gap. It is like adapting to the disorder of a trashed room and living in it without ever cleaning it up.

For example, poor people tend not to throw things away because they project every possible future risk into the present. But people who understand that ownership itself is a cost calculate how often they are actually going to need something before deciding to keep it. In other words, they ask themselves whether they use it only once a year, whether it merely takes up space at home, and whether they would even be able to find it when they need it. That is how they decide whether to make it part of what they own. So wise people own fewer things, but the things they do own are always of very high quality.

In this way, poor people do not realize that obsession with ownership is itself a cost. Even substantially reducing the amount of stuff you own would immediately help solve housing costs. It is worth remembering one thing: if you have a great deal of something, that means you do not understand it well enough. Craftsmen may be able to use many tools, but the tools they actually use are very few. Most of the time, they use them in many different ways. The same is true in sales: revenue is concentrated in the main product, while the rest is secondary. Ownership, too, should be concentrated like sales. That is where the real contest over cost is decided. In particular, if you own too many things, you cannot find what you need when you need it. Because you do not even clearly know whether you have it or not, you end up buying it again. You spend money, and the management costs pile up as well.

Second, poor people and rich people really do see desire differently. When poor people see someone trying to do something, they say, “You can’t do that, don’t do it, it’s dangerous,” pretending to worry about others while actually crushing their motivation. They break people down, trample on them, and suggest they should not even try to get back up. Why? Because then they themselves do not look inadequate, and they get to feel a strange sense of sameness with everyone else. But if a friend succeeds in secret, they either try to latch on or gossip maliciously until they can bring that person back down to their level. It is a base and peculiar psychology that seeks equality by cutting a friend down.

By contrast, wealthy people become highly encouraging even when all they hear is the faintest possibility—“I have this idea, should I give it a try?” They boost your motivation so actively that it almost feels as if you cannot help wanting to do it and as if success is bound to follow. Even if nothing comes of it, they know that they can still learn something from discussing it and that stimulating another person’s desire also stirs their own. They support and encourage one another; they never trample on someone’s dream. They know that if they do, they will no longer be able to meet in the same world.

Desire is an emotion with an enormous opportunity cost. Everyone knows that the intensity of first love is different from the feelings of love later in life. Desire is the same. When you are fired up, that is when you should act; it costs less, and you can experience much more. But when people crush that desire with other excuses—money, time—they destroy a person’s most important resource. They block, at the source, the opportunity to create added value.

I once heard an absurd story. A friend, A, wanted to eat fried chicken and asked friend B to join. B had no money and said he could not afford it. A then said he had a coupon that would let them buy a 25,000 won chicken for 20,000 won. B replied that if they did not eat it, they would “profit” 20,000 won. A agreed and gave up on eating chicken. Then the two of them happily went back to playing games for several more hours, pleased with themselves for thinking they had just earned 20,000 won.

How wonderful, right? That is the economics of poverty. If you live like that, you will never escape poverty for your entire life. That is a philosophy for escaping 18th- and 19th-century poverty. If you want to go through life never eating chicken, always holding back, then live like that. But if you become wealthy only by suppressing yourself every time you want chicken, every time you want coffee, what on earth would be the point? Economics never says that money itself is what has value.

If you live that way, the first thing you lose is the palate to distinguish quality from inferiority. When desire arises and the brain blocks it, it also severs the neural pathways related to it. The brain is always building patterns, so once they are damaged, they are hard to restore. Even calculated at minimum wage, the two of them would only have needed to work an hour or two to afford chicken. When I heard that story, it was so absurd I could only laugh in disbelief. In the end, it was nothing more than submission to laziness; it had nothing to do with patience.

If that is your economic philosophy, then doing nothing and just staying home playing games becomes the highest good. It becomes the most efficient way to maximize your “gain.” As a result, you lose the eye for distinguishing what is refined from what is crude, and the opportunity to learn such things is cut off at the source. Why? Because, in that mindset, refraining from doing something is more profitable than doing it. Why not just die, then? Wouldn’t that make everything easier? I really wish people would wake up.

If you cannot change your worldview, you will ultimately stay where you are. Because people dismiss and ignore things like self-help books and psychology books, they remain trapped in the same place. Most people are fixed inside their own world, which is why breaking out of it is so difficult. Even if the help of a mentor briefly leads them off that track, they are quickly nudged back onto it. That is why you need long training to create a new path and keep following it. Find a good teacher and stay close for a long time, so that the fragrance lingers on you.

Knock, and it will be opened to you.

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Original title: 지식과 욕망의 경제학

Author: Kyeong-mo Son

Date: 2020-02-24

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=15&idx=22413