Hal Finney wrote:
>Alex writes:
> > Overall, I believe markets *are* better than centralized planning.
> >... However, I think everything can be debugged, ....
> > b) Problems that are inherently intractable to market solutions.
>
>Economists have widely studied failures of markets. There are probably
>hundreds or thousands of books available specifically on the subject. ...
>The thing to keep in mind is that centralized systems also have failures,
>and those failure modes tend to be worse IMO.
I see that this thread has resulted in a great many posts, as similar
discussions often do on the net, but I fear the best that can come of most
of them is to entice someone to go actually learn about the topic.
The fact is that the social world is a complex place, and as Hal indicates
many people have spent their lives studying it. Such people have a much
better chance of having something useful to say than people blowing off
steam on a mailing list. Large numbers of people have considered these
questions carefully, and written a huge number of books and articles on
related topics. If you actually want to say something worth listening
to on the topic, you at least need to read and think about lots of those
books and articles. But if you just want to blow off steam, then you just
need some wit and attitude.
Of course the big problem is that we live in democracies, and it is hard
for citizens to vote intelligently if they don't understand these things.
But that just implies that voters can't vote intelligently in such systems.
"Market failures", btw, are better named "things that can go wrong in markets"
just as "government failures" are "things that can go wrong with governments."
But just because something can go wrong doesn't mean it must go wrong.
A flat tire is a auto-failure, but that doesn't mean all cars must have flat
tires - you can make a tire that has no air inside to break out. Similarly
for every thing that can go wrong you can imagine some alternative institution
where than can't happen.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:37:14 MDT