Stop Making Sense

The best movie review I ever read (?!), of Chronicles of Narnia (haven't seen and probably won't unless on an airplane), is by Tyler Cowan on Marginal Revolution, and reads, in part:

OK, I missed the first thirty minutes and heard the rest in a blurry Mexican dub.  My question remains: What does scarcity mean in a fantasy film?

If you are a Queen with an ice palace and a magic sword, why do you use (hire?) two lumbering polar bears to pull your chariot?  Especially in the temperate climate of New Zealand.  If a lion can be reincarnated, is the rest of the plot all for show or a test?  Just how do resources get allocated?

Perhaps it is faith which is scarce in fantasy stories.  As stocks of faith rise and fall, other complementary resources, including the power of your weapons, are reallocated accordingly by the principles of the imaginary world.

That seems to imply that fantasy films cannot operate under the game-theoretic assumption of "common knowledge."  People must disagree about the true model governing the world, otherwise greater faith yields no relative advantage.

Are fantasy movies what economic models would look more like if we took the absence of common knowledge more seriously?  (Yes there are stylized models of non-common knowledge in the specialized literature but the notion is kept under check; the game-theoretic results we use typically are built on common knowledge assumptions.)  Keep in mind that, above a certain level of subsistence, much of your welfare springs from your inner stories and narratives, not from concrete goods and services.  Your real advantage in life, if you are born sufficiently wealthy, is your ability to tell yourself beneficial stories.

This blog post just rings all the bells for me. I was travelling last week, and am spending the day catching up on my reading. I have several old-fashioned articles (a Gladwell thing in the New Yorker, something from Scientific American, etc.) open in browser windows, but I'm avoiding reading them. Truth is, I much prefer to get my information in these concentrated, poetic, intuitively leapy bursts. Cowen's post is about anything and everything at once, and makes no sense and perfect sense. Reading his thought is as close to actually having the thought as is possible--it's practically a Vulcan mind meld.

I guess that's what is blogging is doing to our communication styles: re-codifying the way we transmit information from brain to brain, to better resemble the way these packets are passed from synapse to synapse within a brain. Discrete, hallucinatory bursts of info that can be infinitely re-ordered, "remembered" and "reassociated" as needed. Finally, the end of that clunky, temporary construct known as "rationality" is in sight (or I should say it's in thinking distance).