Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Say what?! anniemal may have picked it up and quoted it, but I indisputably wrote it. I'm sorry, but I was there at the time.

The context was my entry on Progress Rail (a rail salvage company) and how the destruction of streetcar and interurban rail rolling stock and equipment between 1930 and 1960 was an incredible waste of wealth in classical economics terms. It's hard to justify rational markets when, on the one hand, you have an enormous demand for rebuilt and second-hand rail equipment, and on the other hand, you have transit companies burning, shredding, dumping, and dropping in the ocean perfectly serviceable equipment that was often in its first decade or so of a thirty- to forty-plus-year operational lifespan.

As a maker of deathless quotes in d_g's presence, I swear I have no idea whether I said that or not. I might've. I say a lot of things. I'm an opinionated sort of chick.

I try to stay away from such strong language, though it may be what I'm thinking.

Unless you're postulating that the market operates according to emergent behaviour that's "rational" in the same way that chaotic behaviour is rational, isn't that a little contradictory? It's counterintuitive, to say the least.

Markets are not rational; they're extrarational, much like most of human behaviour.