A thought on why we don't intuitively understand the current economic crisis

The human mind is not well equipped to understand the economy. The events of the last month should make that clear. We can understand how supply and demand curves determine the price at which goods are traded. We can understand how a market can clear at a price for which no remaining buyer will pay more for a good and no remaining seller will accept less.

Leontiev suggested the interconnectedness of economic activities, with the outputs of many economic activities forming inputs for other activities, and consumers siphoning off the final products. Assuming linearity, he was able to draw upon matrix algebra to calculate the equilibrium values for all the economic production activities.

Linear programming approaches in economics expand the approach to find solutions to economic systems that satisfy sets of inequalities and optimize some objective function, again assuming linearity.

In fact, economic systems are really complicated. A set of complex non-linear differential equations might be a better approximation of what is happening (linear approximations seem reasonable when changes are small, but as changes get large their approximation seems likely to fail). Moreover, issues of uncertainty and crowd psychology suggest simulations using complexity theory might have a place in modeling the economic interactions we have been seeing.

Our poor monkey brains did not evolve to allow us to intuit the behavior of such complex systems.