Economics – An Essay? Or a Story?

“Who is John Galt?

Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged atop that question. It took me a while, but by my mid-thirties I was very enthusiastic about the main premise. It contained some powerful ideas do, if not potent. Her philosophical model, Objectivism*, helped explain the world’s workings. At least for a time. I was predisposed to fall for it. Rugged individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, an abhorrence for state power – it left me longing to live in Galt’s Gulch, her mythical libertarian town, hidden high in the Rockies.

But I chose a profession that forces one to maintain an open mind, question constantly, even those things we cling to desperately but refuse to call them dogmas. Especially those things. In time it struck me that while Rand’s paperback utopia may be the way to organize humanity in theory, it would create a living hell in practice. When pushed hard, I still claim to be a neoliberal with a touch of libertarian, but the truth is far more complicated. Because after decades of studying humanity, majorly by being one, I’ve come to see that each of the great philosophies, the political theories, religions, and economic models have something valuable to offer. Our reality is an endless battle amongst them all, with the jagged front lines advancing and retreating. At the very moment a system appears triumphant, victorious, eternal, inevitable, the decay has already set in. That’s because to me the only immutable truth is that whatever we touch, we change in ways that reflect our likeness. And humans are as magnificently complex as we are sublimely flawed. Were we not, the world would be awfully boring and perhaps unworthy of any type of following.” – Eric Peters

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According to Wikipedia, “Objectivism in economics, derived from Ayn Rand’s philosophy, advocates for laissez-faire capitalism as the only moral social system, where rational self-interest drives prosperity and government is strictly limited to protecting individual rights and property. It emphasizes voluntary exchange, rejecting the initiation of force and altruism, promoting a free market as the “trader” principle.” It is a is a philosophical system named and developed by Russian-American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. She described it as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”

And this is where I can no longer accept this system as desirable for the world as a whole. How can a man’s happiness represent the moral purpose of his life? How is growth and achievement the main motivations behind a life dedicated to pursue happiness as if everything else was relatively less important? How could self-interest guide our hand towards any type of true achievement, moral or otherwise?

Life comes at your fast. My intentional construction of empathy came with high price tag, if I may make a financial pun here. But the moment of truth was when I saw a beautiful little butterfly in my walk on the southerner rambla with Lala, where I realized there are things in life, life, where it is worth fighting against all odds to hold on to what saves us from falling into the abyss. And to me, that person and that moment have the same name: Lala.

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The Journey

My convictions about understanding the economics of life started to crack upon observations of life and, if I may share some sense of beginning, from Gary Becker (how could I doubt a Nobel Prize winner?) Before that, my sense of clarity was so sharp it felt like truth.

Economics at University instilled in me the delightful idea that the world could be arranged into a system as elegant as an equation. Adam Smith’s invisible hand was truth. Incentives aligned, markets cleared, individuals—rational, self-interested—pursuing their own ends, and in doing so, unknowingly (unknowingly! unintentional philanthropy!) contributing to the greater good. It wasn’t just intellectually satisfying; it was morally reassuring. No need for coercion, no need for paternalism. Freedom, properly understood, would take care of the rest. And it should, because it was supposed to, because… like at this beautiful model, and this perfect set of equations that essentially say that were it not for the public sector, we would all be living a utopia of collective happiness.

I read voraciously. I admired the internal consistency of it all—the beauty of a framework where each piece reinforced the next. It felt like discovering the underlying code of society. And like anyone who believes they’ve glimpsed something fundamental, I became not just a student of it, but a staunch defender.

I could argue for hours about price signals, economic distortions, dead weight… About how well-intentioned interventions often backfire. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, after all. About how dignity comes not from being given, but from earning and accomplishing. I believed all this. It wasn’t abstract to me—it was ethical. To interfere too much, I thought, was to rob people of agency. And that would leave so many BMW-deserving individuals having to take solace in the fact that they could still get from point A to point B by bicycle, the mode of transportation they could afford to ride and cry on as necessary.

And then, slowly, something began to fracture.

Not in the theory. The theory remained intact, as theories often do. The fracture appeared in these uncomfortable spaces where theory met life.

It wasn’t a single moment. It was an accumulation. A series of encounters that didn’t quite fit the model, small at first, then impossible to ignore.

I met people who worked relentlessly, much harder than me, and still couldn’t secure stability. Not temporarily, but structurally and systematically. People whose effort did not translate into upward movement, not because of a lack of discipline or foresight, but because the ground beneath them was uneven in ways I had never accounted for. Before that, I believe that the field was mostly leveled for all.

I saw what it meant to be one missed paycheck away from unraveling. To have your choices constrained not by preference, but by survival. The textbooks spoke of trade-offs; reality showed me ultimatums.

Pay rent or buy medicine.
Work while sick or lose your job.
Stay in a harmful environment or face homelessness.

These are not decisions in the way economics likes to define them. They are compressions of human possibility.

And what unsettled me most was not that these situations existed—I had always known, in an abstract sense, that they did. It was that the framework I held so tightly had very little to say about them, except to suggest that, over time, the system would correct itself. But what if it took their lifetime for that system to correct itself? And what if it corrects in one sense, but breaks down in others. For example, the man whose firm finally “realized” he deserved to be promoted, only to catch a disease that would leave him bedridden so long that he was deep into debt by the time he got discharged from the hospital.

“Over time” is, thus, a phrase that carries a cruelty when you attach it to a human life.

Over time, a child grows up malnourished.
Over time, a treatable illness becomes chronic.
Over time, dignity erodes into resignation.

Life cannot wait for equilibrium, just like justice delivered late is unfairness.

I began to notice something else I alluded to before. Poverty was not just a lack of resources; it was a form of social invisibility. When you lack financial means in a system where participation is mediated by money, you are not merely constrained—you are, in many ways, deleted.

Your preferences don’t register in the market.
Your voice carries less weight in institutions.
Your presence becomes conditional.

It is a quiet form of ostracization not enforced by decree, but by design.

And this is where my certainty began to give way to something else—not rejection, not yet, but genuine doubt. I used to call it “a productive kind of discomfort.”

The models I had studied were not wrong in their mechanics. Incentives do matter. Markets do coordinate information in ways that no central planner could replicate at scale. But they are incomplete in a way that matters profoundly when your goal, my goal, is not just efficiency, but the mitigation of suffering.

Efficiency, after all, is indifferent to distribution.

A system can be highly efficient and still produce outcomes that, at a human level, feel intolerable. And if your framework does not account for that—if it treats those outcomes as acceptable externalities—then perhaps the issue is not with reality, but with the frame itself.

This realization did not come with a clean alternative.

If anything, it brought a kind of intellectual humility I had not experienced before. Because once you begin to question the accuracy and completeness of one system, you quickly realize that no single model offers a true substitute.

The debates I once approached with certainty now felt… underdetermined. How could I debate these thoughts now devoid of the eloquence and certainty that allowed me to present the arguments as facts and the final premise as an undeniable truth.

On one side, the dangers of overreach: bureaucracies that calcify, policies that distort incentives, interventions that create dependency or unintended consequences. I did not imagine these concerns; they are real, and history is full of their consequences.

On the other side, I struggled with accepting that the undeniable presence of preventable suffering in systems that rely too heavily on self-correction. A faith in markets that, when left untempered, can produce not just inequality, but exclusion.

And somewhere in between, the messy terrain where actual lives unfold.

I started to move, cautiously at first but decisively later, toward a different posture. Less about defending a system, more about interrogating outcomes. Less about ideological purity, more about human consequence.

It became harder to argue, for instance, that access to healthcare should be treated purely as a market good. Illness is not a preference. It does not arise from choice, and its consequences ripple beyond the individual. A system that allows preventable suffering because of inability to pay may be consistent within a certain framework—but consistency is not the same as justice.

The same questions emerged around shelter. Around food. Around the basic conditions required for a person to exist with dignity.

If these are prerequisites for participation in any system—economic or otherwise—then leaving them entirely to the fluctuations of market dynamics begins to feel less like a principled stance and more like an abdication.

And yet, I remained cautious.

Because I have not abandoned what I once believed—I have absorbed it into a broader, less certain understanding. I still believe in the power of markets, in the importance of incentives, in the dangers of poorly designed interventions. But I no longer believe they are sufficient. A meaningful influence in this matter were my discussions with Lala, who helped expand my understanding of humanity in the context of their needs and wants in a way that none of the dozens of textbooks I read on this topic would’ve accomplished.

What I have come to believe instead is something less elegant, less satisfying in its symmetry, but demonstrably more honest:

That no economic model, conceived in isolation, resolves the problem of human suffering. And most may not even do a decent job at mitigating it.

Models are abstractions. They are maps—useful, necessary, but always imperfect. They are statements of conventional wisdom meant to shape the ethos of society, like the one about expressing preference for being able to cry on an expensive car simplify in order to clarify. But in doing so, they omit. And what they omit is often precisely what matters most when we shift from analysis to ethics.

Suffering does not distribute itself neatly along the axes we measure.

It is lived in specifics. In bodies. In moments that do not aggregate cleanly into data.

And so the task, as I see it now, is not to find the “correct” model and apply it universally. It is to remain attentive to where each model succeeds and where it fails—and to be willing to adjust, even at the cost of ideological coherence.

This is not a comfortable position.

It invites criticism and challenge from all sides. To those who prioritize efficiency, it may seem like a concession to sentiment. To those who prioritize equity, it may seem insufficiently radical. But that’s the unlikely balance Lala and I looked to achieve in our debates on the matter, or at least a base position that, if distinct, reached the realms of “acceptable” for each party.

Alas, that tension is unavoidable.

Because the world we are trying to describe, and shape, is not consistent in the least. It resists clean and clear solutions. Not even the strongest of soaps, one that lasts forever, could polish all ends towards a frictionless endeavor.

What it demands instead is a kind of pluralism. A willingness to draw from different traditions, to experiment, to correct, to listen to the other one. This is the challenge Lala and I had in front of us, hence our debates and discussions.

To recognize that dignity is not an emergent property we can assume will arise if conditions are right—but something that must be actively safeguarded.

I think back often to the version of myself who argued so confidently (two back-to-back gold medals from debate class speak less about intelligence and more about the confident delivery of the ignorant). A greater sense of empathy and a clearer intention to find areas of agreement rather than weak arguments to mercilessly attack has shape my style, because what’s at stake her is our love, which I value above any material being.

I don’t dismiss my old me. He was trying to make sense of a complex world with the tools he had. And in many ways, those tools are still part of how I think.

But I also recognize the immensity of what he could not yet see: That behind every model is an implicit choice about what we are willing to tolerate, what we stand for, and the type of person we want to be while on this planet; and with luck for a little bit longer after our death.

And that the real question is not whether a system works in theory, but whether we can look at its outcomes—in all their unevenness—and say, without hesitation, that they align with the kind of world we are willing to defend. Beyond being willing to defend one where it’s better to cry on a BMW than on a bicycle, I’d argue and even fight towards one where your mode of transportation, as a symbol for material possessions, does not define the access that person has to healthcare, healthy food, and clean water.

I no longer have a single answer to that question. But I’ve learned to sit with it longer, and to listen to the people that I love, that love me, and even those who deserve my intellectual respect even when, as usual, they disagree with me. To let it unsettle me, and make me uncomfortable in its unpredictability.

I hope to be able to allow that discomfort and chaos to guide, rather than threaten, the way I think about economics—not as a closed system of truths, but as an ongoing, imperfect attempt to reconcile efficiency with empathy, structure with humanity, and freedom with the simple, seemingly obvious idea that no one should be rendered invisible by the circumstances of their birth. And no one in a true, loving relationship, should ever made to feel invisible by their significant other.