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> the market ends up magically having this sort of collective intelligence What if one person had enough resources to pay all firemen to not fight fires at all

• ctdonath 7y ago
  The number of people willing to be paid to not fight fires is unlimited.
• AlexB138 7y ago
  Then there would be unfilled jobs for firemen, which would increase the wages for firemen, which would prompt more people to move into a career as a firefighter, which would increase the supply of firemen until the jobs willing to pay the new prevailing wage were mostly filled, approximately. That's exactly how pricing signals work. "Firemen" is not a fixed set of people.
• eloff 7y ago
  It's not perfect. But it is better than all the alternatives we currently have. Intelligence does not imply perfection.
• turk73 7y ago
  That's interesting because the US has seen this kind of behavior in the past where moneyed interests simply paid the cops not to enforce the law or paid judges or others in positions of authority to look the other way. It's bribery, though, isn't it? That's not a market based solution, it is a form of corruption. We appear to be living through another Gilded Age where super wealthy individuals can run roughshod over the rest of the population by simply out spending the competition. This is, for example, why the Clintons have never been prosecuted.
• hirundo 7y ago
  > The "collective intelligence" of the market has obvious blind spots. As does the collective intelligence of the voters and the state. Whichever is more, and more consistently intelligent is apparently not obvious.