Economic efficiency often undermines sociopolitical autonomy

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Economic efficiency often undermines sociopolitical autonomy<br>Against being econ-brained

Richard Ngo<br>Mar 10, 2026

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Many people in my intellectual circles use economic abstractions as one of their main tools for reasoning about the world. However, this often leads them to overlook how interventions which promote economic efficiency undermine people’s ability to maintain sociopolitical autonomy. By “autonomy” I roughly mean a lack of reliance on others—which we might operationalize as the ability to survive and pursue your plans even when others behave adversarially towards you. By “sociopolitical” I mean that I’m thinking not just about individuals, but also groups formed by those individuals: families, communities, nations, cultures, etc.1<br>The short-term benefits of economic efficiency tend to be legible and quantifiable. However, economic frameworks struggle to capture the longer-term benefits of sociopolitical autonomy, for a few reasons. Firstly, it’s hard for economic frameworks to describe the relationship between individual interests and the interests of larger-scale entities. Concepts like national identity, national sovereignty or social trust are very hard to cash out in economic terms—yet they’re strongly predictive of a country’s future prosperity. (In technical terms, this seems related to the fact that utility functions are outcome-oriented rather than process-oriented—i.e. they only depend on interactions between players insofar as those interactions affect the game’s outcome).<br>Secondly, economic frameworks typically assume that people act in their rational interests at each point in time. They therefore rule out adversarial dynamics like credible threats (and following through on commitments more generally). Yet both offensive and defensive commitments are crucial aspects of how groups make decisions (as decision theories like FDT and UDT attempt to capture). For example:<br>The legal system’s commitment to punishing criminals (even when the punishment costs society much more than the crime did) is the foundation on which economic property rights are maintained.

A nation’s commitment to regaining territory lost in wars (even when it can’t be justified by cost-benefit analyses, like Britain’s defense of the Falklands) deters enemies from trying to seize that territory in the first place.

A more general principle here is that, while economists tend to think about what’s rational on the margin, political power depends on what would happen in worst-case scenarios. Marginal thinking is often more useful in the short term, but in the long term control over the worst-case outcomes provides leverage (for you or your adversaries) to shape the whole landscape of marginal effects. For example, if a tyrannical ruler sometimes executes people who seem disloyal, then his subjects might respond by proactively punishing dissidents to prove their own loyalty. Hence relatively infrequent executions can be amplified into a society-wide control apparatus that shapes everyone’s marginal incentives. (On a technical level, this is related to how changes in disagreement points can have big effects on the solutions of bargaining games—though mainstream bargaining theory hasn’t accounted for how this incentivizes threats.)<br>Thirdly, economics assumes commensurability (e.g. that goods and services can be priced in terms of money). But the mechanisms and institutions which maintain sociopolitical autonomy require a level of reliability which is undermined by commensurability. For example:<br>Individuals whose integrity is for sale at the right price can’t be trusted as leaders.

Legal systems which punish speech based on how much harm they think it does are easily weaponized. (This is more of a utilitarian failing than an economic failing, but utilitarianism also relies heavily on commensurability.)

Countries which concede some territory to their neighbors undermine their ability to credibly commit to defending the rest of their territory.

(James C. Scott's work on how states use commensurability and standardization to scale their power is very relevant to this.)<br>These particular examples are sufficiently obvious that few people defend treating them as commensurable. However, in the rest of this post I’ll discuss five cases where I think many people are applying economic frameworks too broadly, and thereby undermining the sociopolitical foundations that economic analysis implicitly relies on. I’ll refer to this as being “econ-brained”. Econ-brain is related to neoliberalism, libertarianism, and effective altruism, though it’s not synonymous with any of them.2 It’s often critiqued by both the anti-market left and the nationalist right; I’m more sympathetic to the latter critiques, but will mostly focus on examples that aren’t polarized along standard partisan lines.<br>I’d eventually like to develop a formal...