> Perfect information symmetry... by no means a magical, inherent property to markets. I don't agree. This is view not indicative of how things operate in real

> Perfect information symmetry... by no means a magical, inherent property to markets. I don't agree. This is view not indicative of how things operate in reality. As a market participant, one can always determine incentives by "following the money", as long as the actors are somewhat rational. Talented traders, middle-men, etc develop an instinct for these flows which can never be perfectly legibilized into economic models. This intuition then leads them to deduce information that is hidden. The corollary to this is one shouldn't participate in markets without this ability, which is why almost every retail investor should not be directly involved in stock markets and just invest in index funds instead. The second corollary is because these flows are impossible to realistically quantitatively model, no faithful model of the market is possible unless the model replicates the market structure itself. All thats left are impermanent imperfect models, some may be based on historical data, some on various heuristics specific to a given market, some even partially successful in predicting what will happen for some time, but all ultimately doomed to failure as other market participants game them. Your examples, food labeling, real estate txns, insider trading are great arguments for progressive refinement of market dynamics, which is the position I'm arguing. They are not arguments for an alternative to markets and no known alternative to markets can solve these problems while maintaining the same level of functional efficiency that markets do. > Market based systems can and have done this too. Yet society recovered. Under non-market systems, an irreversible catastrophe is more likely than under market systems. Because market systems are unstable, they transmit critical information faster than non-market alternatives, allowing for preventive measures. Even if this information is imminent collapse. Market collapse and dysfunction prefigure collapse and are valuable information in-and-of themselves. This remains the case despite anthropogenic climate change, etc. Markets are ultimately not about money, but information. What sort of system can transmit information more efficiently than a market can? No centralized system has been proven to be as successful. And, for foundational math reasons, I don't believe any sort of planning algorithm can beat a network of decentralized profit maximizing agents. So our two options are 1) to improve market function via progressive refinement or 2) find an alternative analog that preserves the information fluidity that markets provide. I have very little optimism on 2) but am open to being surprised.