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The Cognitive Trap of Naive Economic Intuition: The Homologous Misconception from the Primacy-of-Agriculture Doctrine to the Labour Theory of Value

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Human beings' initial understanding of economic activities relies heavily on sensory intuition and everyday experience. This naive cognition has formed a unified mode of thinking transcending time and space. China's ancient ideology of prioritising agriculture and restraining commerce, together with the core underlying logic of Marx's theory of surplus-value, appear to be two entirely distinct ideological systems originating respectively from ancient agrarian experience and modern rigorous political economy. In reality, however, they are rooted in one and the same innate human economic intuition: only tangible material production generates new-added wealth, while circulation, exchange and capital operation merely take part in wealth distribution and produce no value increment. Viewed from the perspective of the Austrian School of economics, this cognition that defines wealth through direct experience and severs production from exchange constitutes one of the most typical intuitive fallacies in the history of economics. This cognitive trap not only governed China's centuries-old policies of restraining commerce and constrained the economic evolution of traditional society, but also shaped the one-sided perceptions of capital, commerce and the market within socialist countries, exerting far-reaching adverse impacts on the development of economic theory and social practice.
DOI: 10.17613/smfwj-t1k83
Author: Shan, Baowei
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7208793456
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