[jack_tripper]

>to accept a world where there is no mastermind and where randomness and chaos sit at the bottom of history

Except the stuff people actually care about like purchasing power, bills, wages, and housing are manipulated by purposely designed economic policies and not by randomness.

[joachimma]

It seems perfectly plausible to me that the economic incentives are such that there is no need to "design" any of this, no smoke-filled back room needed.

[Retric]

Economic incentives never point in just one direction. There’s always tradeoffs around time horizons, risks, etc which is where individual people’s decisions come into play.

Should we subsidize industry X is rarely a question decided on economic merits alone. And so it goes with individual interests shaping the entire global economy in surprisingly profound ways. Extreme ultraviolet lithography for example shapes industries, but has a history steeped in various public/private partnerships and global politics.

[jack_tripper]

What?! That statement is self contradictory. If you have economic incentives then somebody or a group of people put those incentives into place in order to reach a desired outcome(typically accumulation of wealth and/or power for a target group).

We're not talking about facts of nature like gravity or the speed of light. You don't exist in a truly random system but one where you're playing by the rules made by someone else, rules that can change on a whim, as the government intervenes at every level to manipulate the scales, for better and for worse, resulting in it picking winners and loosers.