Jan Kulveit

Our preferences may be easily influenced and not particularly self-interested.

The ideologies we adopt may be driven by non-human systems.

Our world models may be weak, resulting in massive information asymmetries.

There even is a strand of economic literature that explicitly models parent-child interactions, families, and formation of preferences.

This body of work may provide useful insights I'd be curious about, is anyone looking there?

The solution may be analogous.

Some form of paternalism, where human minds are massively protected by law from some types of interference.

This may or may not work, but once it is the case, you basically cannot start from classical liberal and libertarian assumptions.

As an intuition pump, imagine someone trying to do macroeconomy of 10-year-olds and younger in the current world.

Other core concepts We could examine some other typical econ assumptions and concepts in a similar way, and each would deserve a paper-length treatment.

This post tries to mostly stay a bit more meta-dash, so just some pointers.

Property rights

Most economic models take property rights as exogenous, assume well-defined and enforced property rights.

If you look into how most property rights are actually connected to physical reality, property rights often mean some row exists in a database run by the state or a corporation.

Enforcement ultimately rests on the state's monopoly on violence, cognitive monitoring capacity and will to act as independent enforcer.

As all sorts of totalitarian, communist, colonial or despotic regimes illustrate, even in purely human systems, private property depends on power.

If you assume property is stable, you are assuming things about governance and power.

Transaction costs and firm boundaries Coase theory explains why firms exist.

It is sometimes cheaper to coordinate internally via hierarchy than externally via markets.

The boundary of the firm sits where transaction costs of market exchange equal the costs of internal coordination.