If a post gets downvoted, it could be a geinuenly awful post. But another post that gets downvoted, but is actually empiracially scientifically true, then it is treated equivolent as the other even though they are the same.
I don’t think this is the answer but one idea is to add points to people, or products, who are verified to be awesome. So that would be a scientist or compassionate politician gets more votes or a healthy product gets a subsidy.
This is one of the first things addressed in econ classes: people are rational. In that case, the itdependsman’s comment is true. In the case you mentioned (and there are many similar cases), people make irrational choices, making the free market theories less realistic. Economists have to make these kinds of assumptions to make modeling the economy easier, but at the end people’s behaviour is chaotic and may be impossible to model at all.
Edit: behavioural economics is trying to understand the decision making process of individuals, and when they are more (or less) rational.
well then the whole model is wrong. Logically if your axioms are false then the whole argument is invalid.
Most of the time these models apply to the real world. Yes, in the cases where people act irrationally they don’t work. But a lot of economic phenomena can be explained through these simplified models.
“in the cases” makes it sound like irrationality is rare. It’s not rare. It’s always. Maybe the models have some sort of predictive power, but the explanation for why they work is faulty