Historically, treating money as a proxy for well-being made sense. For much of human history, material scarcity was the dominant obstacle to most desires. But in modern, highly abundant societies, the relationship between wealth and well-being weakens, plateaus, or even reverses. More money often stops solving the problems people actually care about. -/- The reframing proposed here does not reject markets, profit, or growth. Instead, it reinterprets them. Growth goes from the classical or neoclassical interpretation of more in terms of (...) more material abundance, wealth or profit and is instead interpreted as an increase in people’s capacity to solve the problems that block them from their desired state. Profit is also reinterpreted in this reframe is as a signal of problem-solving effectiveness, not an end in itself. -/- This is not a final theory of economics. It is a reframing at the level of first principles. Utility maximization reappears as a special case when what people most desire can be expressed in utility terms. But by starting from desire rather than utility, this paper puts forth the notion that economics generalizes more naturally to non-market behavior, apparent “irrationality,” and questions of well-being that resist simple measurement. -/- If economics is to remain relevant in a world where material abundance no longer guarantees fulfillment, it may need to rethink not just its models, but its north star. (shrink)

Traditional economic theory begins with a convenient but fragile assumption: that the analyst can identify and measure the "ends" toward which agents strive. Whether framed as the maximization of utility, the pursuit of happiness, or the optimization of wealth, these models treat the internal motivations of human beings as legible, quantifiable variables. However, the recurring failures of predictive modeling—from systemic financial collapses to the persistent "irrationality" of individual choice—suggest a foundational error in how we conceptualize action. -/- This paper proposes (...) a radical departure from equilibrium-based models toward a "Daoist Economics." This framework abandons the attempt to read the "black box" of human ends and instead focuses on the physics of the path. By treating desire as a psychological primitive and the world as an exogenous topography of friction and cost, we shift the focus from why agents move to how they navigate. (shrink)

This paper examines the conceptual consequences of replacing utility maximization with desire as the primitive of economic explanation. Rather than modeling agents as maximizers of an abstract scalar, it treats them as problem-solvers who act to reduce perceived gaps between current and desired states. The shift is not proposed as a rejection of formal economic modeling, but as a reorientation at the level of first principles. From this reframing follow systematic reinterpretations of value, coordination, institutional design, measurement, and systemic risk. (...) Value becomes relational rather than intrinsic; prices function as coordination signals rather than measures of ultimate worth; GDP is recast as a derivative proxy for problem-solving capacity; and institutions are understood as topology-shaping structures that alter perceived difficulty and discounting. The framework further offers an account of collective fragility in which catastrophic outcomes emerge not from irrationality but from coherent directional movement under heavy-tailed world dynamics. This paper attempts to trace such natural consequences from a shift in the primitive of economics from utility to desire. (shrink)

Economics often starts by stipulating what agents are trying to maximize, then explaining their choices as means to that end. This paper argues that the move quietly overcommits: when ends are uncertain or shifting, labeling behavior “irrational” or “inconsistent” mostly reflects the analyst’s mis specified objective rather than a genuine failure of reason. I propose a “primitive shift” from utility (as an often-contentless placeholder) to desire: we do not assume we know what people want—only that they want something, and act (...) under constraints and limited knowledge to pursue it. This minimal primitive supports a correspondence-style project: familiar pillars of economics reappear as limiting cases once welfare is recast as the value of the reachable set and “cost” as a broad barrier bundle (money, time, risk, stigma, institutional friction). On this basis the paper re-derives canonical phenomena—Invisible Hand coordination, comparative advantage, subjective value, Keynesian animal spirits, Marxian “political prices,” praxeological action, Samuelsonian utility as a local compression, and Sen-style capability reasoning—without positing a universal end. Finally, the framework implies an empirical shift: when behavior is regime-conditional, econometrics should focus on decision-landscape reconstruction rather than global parametric surfaces, illustrated by benchmark gains of a regime-sensitive random forest over logit baselines on the UCI Bank Marketing task. (shrink)

This paper advances a geometric reinterpretation of economics. Its core claim is that for any movement from one state of affairs to another, there exists a true shortest path: a geodesic, understood as a Platonic object of economic life. This path is not defined by observed behavior, nor by retrospective success, but by the underlying structure of the possibility space itself. Yet because real economic life unfolds in a distorted world—shaped by institutions, technological limits, information asymmetries, infrastructure, and path dependence—the (...) geodesic does not generally appear as a straight line. Once mapped onto reality, it bends around hills, basins, and other sources of curvature, often taking forms that seem indirect from a naive perspective. The paper argues that ordinary agents approximate these routes only imperfectly, relying on intuition in the absence of a true map. From this it draws a methodological conclusion: economics should be understood less as the science of predicting agents, and more as the craft of mapping the geometry of possibility space. On this view, economists function as map makers, identifying the contours of constraint and opportunity so that agents may better navigate toward whatever ends they desire. Inefficiency is thus reconceived as excess expenditure induced by curvature, rather than simply as irrationality or failure to optimize. -/- To quote the great Martin Luther King Jr. “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards Justice.” . (shrink)