[extropy-chat] Futurist priorities was ex-tropical

Technotranscendence neptune at superlink.net
Mon Mar 1 16:04:33 UTC 2004


On Monday, March 01, 2004 10:38 AM Mike Lorrey mlorrey at yahoo.com wrote:
>>> Better yet, everyone on the bus has a steering
>>> wheel, and the wheels are steered by the input
>>> of all. This is how markets work. The driver just
>>> monitors the inputs of each passenger so that
>>> the bus actually stays on a road, instead of in a
>>> ditch, but there is a limit to what the driver can
>>> do. If the majority of the passengers are
>>> convinced the bus is going to crash, it will crash.
>>
>> This is a good analogy of how the market works.
>> It therefore bothers me that I would never get on
>> a bus such as you describe!
>
> A finer analogy may say that some passengers
> only have a brake pedal, while some only have
> a gas pedal, some can only steer straight or left,
> others straight or right, while some have all
> controls in front of them. Everybody decides
> what controls each passenger has access to.

Actually, none of these are good analogies for free markets.  A better
one would be a road with many cars on it and no traffic cop.  The bus
analogy actually looks more like how welfare states work.

Also, markets generally work to coordinate plans between their
participants.  This is not because the market magically does this, but
because people generally pursue their plans and adjust their plans when
they experience the benefits and costs of doing so directly.  Market
substitutes, such as command economies and other government
interferences in the market (e.g., taxes, tariffs, corporate welfare,
regulations) interfere with this coordination usually by substituting
one person's or a small group's judgment and goals for those of the
myriad individuals and firms making up an actual market.

Finally, the real problem is not that markets aren't perfect -- nothing
is perfect -- but that the market substitutes rarely do better than
market outcomes and usually do much worse.

Regards,

Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/MyWorksBySubject.html




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