From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Sun Sep 01 2002 - 18:00:29 MDT
On Sunday, September 01, 2002 5:54 PM Reason reason@exratio.com wrote:
>> I disagree here. It could be -- and I reckond it
>> often enough is -- that people are ignorant of
>> the real potential around them. So certain
>> roads never get taken -- even on a free market.
>> The market does not perfectly foresee these
>> things nor is it perfect at exploiting opportunities
>> it does see. It's merely better than the alternative
>> of government intervention. After all, government
>> has no special knowledge or insight here and
>> suffers from the same ignorances -- and even
>> more due to the lack of a genuine price system
>> to aid discovery and dissemination -- and foibles
>> -- even more so since costs are "de-localized"
>> making decision-makers not bear the costs of bad
[snip]
>
> Yes, I should have been clearer there. My point was
> that people in the industry are far better than
> government at arriving at the best way to use
> the resources of their investors and those they
> create. Not that they're perfect, but their experience
> and knowledge have to make them better at this
> than random wonks. Not to mention the ethical thing
> about who has the right to spend a person's wealth...
I wanted to make sure because it seemed as if you meant entrepreneurs
and businesspeople would not make mistakes -- at least, not in the area
of wasting resources. I see each major advance in a growing economy as
sort of people recognizing, "Hey, I've been wasting this and can do
things better." Then others imitate and all the pofit dries up until
the next opportunity is recognized. (Add forgetting into this
simplified model and you can even have people learning better ways to do
some things and having to rediscover old ways because they forgot
something important and began wasting again. This seems to happen with
a lot of innovations where something is supposed to be a radical break
with the past, so people focus on the differences and forget the
similarities. A chief example, perhaps, is the whole internet
economy -- which is only learning now about things like making a profit
through actually having selling product above cost.:)
Cheers!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/MyWorksBySubject.html
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