Question about fundamental societal construction

[Renton]

To be slightly less of a douche-bag: As every example is brought to you by the Human Brain. Which I know is not the best observer. What it senses and what it believes are not what is.

If you're gonna go epistemological out this bitch, I'm gonna bow out of that part of the discussion, I think. I'm no philosopher.

I think its a pretty big cop-out to use the fact that the economy is interconnected and complex to invalidate well-established economic concepts though, especially those which are observable at the micro-level. I think it's substantially less of a cop out to be skeptical of the claim that micro-economic concepts scale perfectly, but you aren't even giving me and wufwugy that much slack here.

In Cambodia we have tuk-tuks, basically they're these open-air motorbike carriages that are used for transportation. There are tuk-tuks in other countries as well, such as in Thailand or in Vietnam, and they behave quite differently. When I lived in Thailand, there were fewer tuk-tuks readily available, and I have much lower leverage in negotiating fares. I essentially had to take the offer I was given because otherwise I would have needed to wait to find another. In Cambodia, on the other hand, the streets are littered with parked tuk-tuks, and you get offered rides even when you don't want them. Naturally, I am much more able to negotiate low prices for rides here than I was in Thailand. This would be an observable case of supply and demand at work. In Thailand there was what an economist would call a seller's market, while in Cambodia it is more of a buyer's market.

Now the more I infer from these examples about the broader economic conditions of these countries, the more I would be guilty of moving into theoryland. But you don't have to go that far into theoryland to infer a lot of really accurate economic data about these two countries just from the observations of prices, supply, and demand of a pair of analogous services or products.