The market price called hormone

Read another book during the holidays - "The Truth about Hormones" by Vivienne Parry. The basic point was that the body has two ways to communicate internally, either quickly via the nervous system or more slowly distributing chemicals via the blood.

The book described in great length the interaction of the glands and the different substances released but failed in my opinion to give a fundamental explanation to the different ways of communications and to the fact that why totally different levels of hormones are needed for "normal" people to keep the bodily functions in balance.

Maybe the answer is evident. The nerves do not reach all cells, while the circulatory system does and that would also explain why hormones are involved in large scale developments in the body - growth, starvation/times of plenty, internal clock synchronization to daytime, sexual maturity and decline, menstruating cycles etc. The hormone levels in the circulatory system would be the new "market prices" to which all cells have to adapt one way or the other. These things would be very difficult to coordinate like a centrally planned economy giving orders to each cell. The radically different levels of hormones of different people considered healthy would then just be the "market" level managing to strike the balance in that individual and since all individuals are - individuals - with different nutrition and circumstances then there is no reason why everybody's "markets" would be the same.

The odd man out is adrenaline, which also messes with the nervous system allowing the synapses to let through more stuff.

Scarcity challenged

Just finished a book "The Undercover Economist" by Tim Harford. I read it with mixed feelings.

See, the whole reason for my pseudonym is my firm belief in the market mechanism to solve allocation problems via the communication of a price (with a spice of game theory and externalities) and Tim has put it so elegantly and concisely in his book. It is exactly how I would have liked to put it and how I have been arguing the issue over the years. Read the book, not my blogs!

I see this mechanism as one of the most fundamental laws of nature, well demonstrated in traditionally non-economical fields as biology and evolution as well as in information theory. The world revolves around creating scarcity and fighting scarcity. All seemingly other conflicts are just dressed up differently.