The Dumbo Principle is one of those strange little things I talk about sometimes — but I realized today, upon reading the phrase in my drafts folder, that I was on the verge of forgetting what I meant by it, so I figured I'd better write it down.

In economics class, you learn about the beautiful and efficient laws of supply and demand and their theoretical virtues. However, when you study real-life phenomena, and by "study real-life phenomena" I mean (in part) "participate in any market whatsoever", you find that these laws never actually hold, due to the Dumbo Principle. The Dumbo Principle is that there's a lot of dumb ridiculous stuff screwing up every economic system, such that nothing ever works the way it's supposed to.

For instance, in various explorations and expositions of economic circumstances, I have learned:

It's actually impossible for wages to rise.

It's actually impossible for the stock market to fall.

It's actually impossible for firms to hire or fire workers (?)

It's actually impossible to pay people proportionate to the usefulness of their service or how much work they do.

Raising or lowering the price of something makes no difference to the amount sold, the time it takes to be sold, nor the amount of profit you will make from it.

It's impossible to bid on things or hold any sort of auction at all.

It's actually impossible to charge people money for anything.

  Especially over the internet.

It's actually impossible to buy anything or retain any type of service without either:

  a. Meeting a guy by the starbucks between 2 and 3pm on Tuesdays ONLY.

  AND/OR

  b. Submitting in triplicate several forms of authentication and identification and letters of good reference and glossy 5″×7″ headshots. The government is probably also involved somehow.

Simultaneously, the government is providing enough free money to distort this entire market, and yet you personally will never see any of it, because it's impossible to get any.

And so on.

Economics is aware of the factors behind the dumbo effect. They have names like "public choice failure", "menu costs", etc etc. But the Dumbo Principle is more my sardonic observation that these factors ALWAYS hold, whenever I try to do something as banal as exchange money for goods or services.