3 ms·

You can't market make between people who have too little money and people who have too much money. Lending money to consumers won't work because while their inc

You can't market make between people who have too little money and people who have too much money. Lending money to consumers won't work because while their increased consumption would produce economic activity and profit for someone, it wouldn't return to them and so such lending is inherently risky, so the interest rates would have to be high, which just further exacerbates the problem that they have too little money. This paper is basically a stone's throw away from the Marxian analysis of crises of capital. It's nice that it's quantitative; a nice complement to all the qualitative criticisms of capitalism's fundamental structure. It's not the market that is the issue, but the tendency of capital to concentrate in the hands of the propertied class. There are two kinds of capitalist societies actually seen in the real world, the unstable kinds, and the kinds that have significant wealth redistribution mechanisms. Real economies oscillate between the two or collapse.

p4wnc6 11y ago
At least in financial markets, it seems that over time, it has only become easier and cheaper for people with less money to purchase liquidity and participate on demand in some of the same markets as wealthy people. While there still are people who are too stricken by poverty to participate, the threshold of participation is getting lower -- which seems to stand in contrast to your claims. On the other hand, there definitely are other forms of exchange, say like dark pools, where wealth and status are required to gain access. I think I would hold out for a model that was able to work with actual transaction data like this, rather than needing the mathematical conveniences of the paper (that only budgets are limiting, that transaction network is the fully connected graph of all participants, etc). It's good work, I hope to see it keep going and go in a more data-driven way.
- danharaj 11y ago
  I don't think we should rely on financial markets for an idea of how markets can correct for structural issues. It hasn't been that long since they collapsed and dragged down the rest of the world economy with them, only being resuscitated by blunt and pervasive intervention at the level of states and multinational institutions.

p4wnc6 11y ago

At least in financial markets, it seems that over time, it has only become easier and cheaper for people with less money to purchase liquidity and participate on demand in some of the same markets as wealthy people. While there still are people who are too stricken by poverty to participate, the threshold of participation is getting lower -- which seems to stand in contrast to your claims. On the other hand, there definitely are other forms of exchange, say like dark pools, where wealth and status are required to gain access. I think I would hold out for a model that was able to work with actual transaction data like this, rather than needing the mathematical conveniences of the paper (that only budgets are limiting, that transaction network is the fully connected graph of all participants, etc). It's good work, I hope to see it keep going and go in a more data-driven way.

danharaj 11y ago
I don't think we should rely on financial markets for an idea of how markets can correct for structural issues. It hasn't been that long since they collapsed and dragged down the rest of the world economy with them, only being resuscitated by blunt and pervasive intervention at the level of states and multinational institutions.