[ExI] AIG Bail out

[Stathis Papaioannou]

2008/9/21 Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com>:

> The difference is presumably that natural selection is entirely mindless,
> while the theory behind an agoric market (or whatever it's to be called) is
> that all the actors are intelligent, somewhat informed agents whose choices
> are at once diversified and when summed still open to reasoned responses in
> a subtle and fluent process of feedbacks. While top-down central controls
> place far too much executive manipulatory power in the paws of a small
> fallible backscratching cabal sharing a narrow ideology and far too little
> information.

The individual players in a market are supposed to be about as
mindless as the individual players in nature. A predator decides
whether to go after its prey according to how easy it expects it will
be to catch, how tasty it expects it to be and so on. There is no
conscious effort to understand or manipulate evolution, which is an
emergent phenomenon from countless such interactions. Similarly,
consumers buy from producers according to how desirable and how
expensive the product is, and the market is what emerges from
countless such interactions, with no one necessarily understanding the
big picture.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou