Naive Economics

We work, save, repay our loans, all in an effort to end up breaking even. Not because we are foolish, but because the system we live in is driven by movement, not possession. Whoever stands still loses. Yet the small investor trading through a phone app is not the new master of movement. More often, we become its fuel. We are not players; we are order flow. Our movement becomes liquidity for someone else’s strategy. 

In Naive Economics, Barbara Piontek names the force behind this system. Thomas Piketty’s economic framework showed that capital outgrows the economy: r > g. Piontek shows that movement has come to outgrow both. As v overtakes r and g, the simulation of the economy begins to detach from the economy itself. 

The core concept is illusionarism: a cognitive system in which epistemic constructs do not mirror reality, but constitute it—by organizing the very conditions of what can be perceived as real, rational, or possible. Illusionarism is the cognitive system that organizes reality. It is not an error, a falsehood, or a mistake, but a structuring construct that determines what we recognize as real in the first place. Ranging across a century of crises, Naive Economics reveals an order that survives not by fixing its failures, but by re-narrating them. 

The breakdown you feel is not an individual failure. It is the logic of the system. And the question is no longer whether the system will endure—but whether it will even be able to recognize when it has been surpassed.