The Game Everyone Bought
A modern fable about imitation and belief. When a student’s app takes over a school, it reveals how innovation, fear, and belonging fuel rational bubbles.
A modern parable of innovation, imitation, and the quiet logic of bubbles
When a student’s app promises to “train your brain,” an entire school adopts it — and discovers how reason, competition, and belonging can create belief systems that outlive their usefulness.
From ketchup economics to herd behavior, a story about the mathematics of conformity and the psychology of progress.
Ketchup Economics
Larry Summers once mocked the way finance congratulates itself on tidy ratios: a two-quart bottle of ketchup always costs twice as much as a one-quart bottle, and everyone treats that symmetry as proof of reason.
He called it ketchup economics — the science of comparison without the substance of judgment.
The joke endures because imitation is efficient.
Humans copy when information is scarce and risk is social.
We anchor our choices in other people’s certainty.
Behavioral economists call this reflexivity: beliefs move markets, and markets confirm beliefs.
Sociologists call it mimetic desire: we want things because others do.
The result is self-reference disguised as intelligence — rational people reinforcing one another’s delusions.
To see how easily it begins, you don’t need a trading floor.
A single classroom will do.
The Beginning of the Game
At Northbridge Secondary, ambition was the air supply.
Hallways echoed with words like optimize and accelerate.
Teachers framed curiosity as a contest.
Felix, a quiet senior who spent lunch coding instead of talking, built an app called NeuroJump.
Its promise was luminous and vague: train your brain, master your focus.
The interface glowed in gentle blue gradients that felt like calmness you could download.
At first, only the perfectionists tried it — the ones who color-code their notebooks and fear the pause between goals.
They claimed it helped them “feel productive.”
What it truly did was translate anxiety into numbers.
Liam, who prided himself on not chasing trends, overheard his friends comparing NeuroScores.
He laughed, then downloaded it that night.
Maybe this is what progress feels like, he thought, confusion that still seems correct.
The Quiet Contagion
Within a month, the school pulsed to the rhythm of pings and streaks.
No one ordered it; everyone obeyed.
Economists call this an informational cascade — the moment when each person’s imitation of others becomes evidence that imitation itself is right.
Once enough people join, skepticism turns into risk.
Teachers praised the app. Parents bragged about it.
Felix updated it weekly — FlowBoost™, SleepSync™, Cognitive Marketplace™.
Students compared scores in the cafeteria with the solemnity of accountants.
Liam started checking his metrics before brushing his teeth.
Each dip in concentration felt like moral failure.
If everyone believes this helps, maybe it’s me who doesn’t work hard enough, he thought.
Felix was invited to speak at assembly.
He talked about “democratizing focus” and the auditorium erupted in applause.
That night, he stared at the ceiling, unsure whether pride or panic kept him awake.
The Age of Belief
By winter, NeuroJump wasn’t a tool; it was a language.
Students talked in streaks, teachers monitored dashboards, and the data looked beautiful — which was enough to make it true.
Downloads soared.
Felix raised prices, launched NeuroJump Pro, and told investors he was “building the operating system of cognition.”
The market rewarded the vocabulary.
Growth looked like wisdom.
Charts replaced conviction.
Meanwhile, the students grew tired.
They spoke less, smiled less, and scrolled more.
Learning had become a performance of attention.
Liam felt his curiosity flatten.
I don’t know if this makes me smarter, he thought. I just know it makes me afraid to stop.
The Collapse
By spring, the silence thickened.
Usage fell, streaks broke, graphs froze.
Felix unveiled NeuroJump Studio, promising “creative autonomy.”
No one cared.
The investors left first, then the teachers, then the students.
Felix pivoted to a new startup — MindFrame AI — insisting his mission was still to “unlock human potential.”
He didn’t mention NeuroJump again.
Liam deleted the app during midterms.
The phone went dark, and the quiet felt ancient.
He opened a notebook, stared at the blank page, and thought, So this is what learning used to feel like.
Why It Happened
Nobody was irrational.
Each person acted reasonably within their frame of reference.
Felix wanted success.
Teachers wanted progress.
Parents wanted proof.
Students wanted to belong.
That alignment of incentives — individually logical, collectively destructive — is what economists call rational imitation.
It’s the same dynamic that fuels bubbles: technology booms, speculative frenzies, ideological crusades.
When everyone optimizes for perception, truth becomes a coordination problem.
Dissent feels inefficient; doubt feels obsolete.
And yet, when the collective belief fades, all that remains is exhaustion.
Coda — The Taste of Ketchup
Bubbles don’t burst; they deflate into silence.
The story ends not with panic but with indifference — the dull ache of realizing you never liked the thing you bought into.
Ketchup economics explains the symmetry.
Herd behavior explains the cause.
We double the bottles, double the hype, double the faith.
Each actor moves logically within the crowd,
until logic itself becomes the crowd.
And then, quietly, we remember that no ratio, however perfect, can make ketchup taste like meaning.
Questions Readers Often Ask
What is herd behavior, and how does it differ from simple trend-following in markets?
Herd behavior occurs when individuals imitate others based on social information rather than fundamentals. Trend-following tracks data momentum; herding amplifies it because each person infers others know more. The result is self-confirming moves that can misprice assets or ideas.
Why do reflexivity and feedback loops make market bubbles self-reinforcing?
Reflexivity links perception and price. Rising prices validate optimistic narratives, drawing in more investors and capital. This feedback sustains bubbles as attention shifts from fundamentals to stories that appear true precisely because they move markets.
How does social imitation spread through informational cascades and online signals?
Informational cascades form when people rely on visible actions instead of private judgment. Online, likes, trends, and rankings turn these cascades into rapid contagion, where each participant’s behavior validates the next—accelerating adoption regardless of underlying quality.
What role does artificial intelligence play in accelerating modern herd effects?
AI amplifies herding by automating pattern recognition and content visibility. Recommendation engines and trend models highlight what’s already popular, tightening feedback loops. The same reflexivity that drives bubbles now operates through algorithmic curation and prediction.
Can individuals or organizations design systems that resist herd behavior while staying adaptive?
Yes. Mechanisms such as blind review, forecast logging, or structured dissent can separate information from imitation. Organizations can balance exploration and coordination by rewarding independent reasoning before group consensus forms.
🔽 Click to Expand: Research Note — The Economics of Imitation
Ketchup Economics (Larry Summers, 1985)
A critique of relative-valuation logic: proving price consistency between assets (or ketchup bottles) while ignoring intrinsic value. The metaphor warns against self-referential analysis.
Reflexivity (George Soros, 1987)
Markets are feedback loops: perceptions influence prices, prices validate perceptions. When beliefs reinforce themselves, valuation detaches from fundamentals.
Informational Cascades (Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer & Welch, 1992)
Individuals, observing others’ choices, infer that prior actors possess private knowledge. Rational imitation thus propagates collective error.
Signaling & Rational Imitation (Spence, 1973; Banerjee, 1992)
Agents copy because conformity signals competence; deviation carries reputational cost even when it is correct.
Herd Behavior
The macro-expression of those micro-mechanisms: rational agents synchronizing on the same belief until the system exhausts itself — economically efficient, existentially hollow.
