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This persistent kind of framing in media is quite possibly a second order effect of the Neoliberal consensus. Markets become the primary tool of societal organi

This persistent kind of framing in media is quite possibly a second order effect of the Neoliberal consensus. Markets become the primary tool of societal organisation, and institutions are bent and dented into an orientation toward the economic value system.

WalterBright 6y ago
> Markets become the primary tool of societal organisation Another way to frame that is people buying what they want and people making and selling what other people want. Sounds good to me!
- atq2119 6y ago
  It's not that that's bad. It's that if everything is viewed only though this particular lens, a wide range of human experience is lost.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    > a wide range of human experience is lost What is the most important human experience that is lost by markets?
    - helmholtz 6y ago
      85% of all animal life, receding glaciers, acidified, deadened oceans, plastic bag islands the size of Texas, depleted drinking water, dwindling natural resources, global uncontrolled rise of temperature, soil erosion, anti-microbial resistance, pandemics, factory farming animal abuse, forest fires, nuclear waste, asbestos in the lungs, lead in the veins, mercury in the nerves, global obesity... ETA: looks like you edited your comment. The original (and rather tone deaf) comment was: "I'm curious what is lost by people doing what they want to do."
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        I edited it to make it easier to answer. Your examples are not examples of a properly set up market system. They are spinning off what are called "externalities", which are costs not born by either the buyer or the seller. A properly set up market would apply those costs to the producer. An example of this is CO2 emission should be taxed, not regulated.
        helmholtz 6y ago
        Ah, indeed, no true scotsman would pollute the planet, don't be daft! We are not blessed to be living in a perfect world that can be set up for an ideal market system. For the last four decades, these externalities have gotten ramped up to fever pitch. I'm interested in your take on how, in this world, we get to a point where ALL of the above consequences can be forestalled through HN's favourite hard-on: deregulation and market forces run amok.
        WalterBright 6y ago
        I have no idea how you're going to accomplish this with centralized economic planning, but there's a much better shot at it with a free market approach. Basically, taxing the externalities is the market based solution. Banning is a ham-fisted inefficient method.
        wcarey 6y ago
        How would price discovery operate on externalities? Who decides what's an externality? It seems like you're suggesting centralized planning under a different name.
        WalterBright 6y ago
        The government decides what is an externality and determines the tax rate. Two things governments are good at: taxing, and starting wars. Why not take advantage of the first? It even has the advantage of being a revenue source for the government, rather than a revenue sink. The government has to tax something, why not externalities? Around here, the government decided to tax plastic shopping bags. Geez, just put a tax on it instead. Raise the tax until plastic shopping bags become scarce enough. Then if someone really wants a plastic shopping bag to use, say, to clean up after their dog, they can if they're willing to pay. Much better than being charged with a crime.
    - sthnblllII 6y ago
      Markets are a means not an ends. Putting 'markets' first is a way of hiding your morally objectionable ends behind a "someone paid me to do it so it must be good" argument.
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        Free markets come with the stipulation that Bob trading with Carol does not hurt uninvolved Ted.
        sthnblllII 6y ago
        Bob knows Carol has a drug addiction. He sells Carol crack cocaine anyway. He has no guilt because the existence of a market for drugs means its ok, after all, Ted isn't harmed until Carol steals his tv to buy more crack. People are not machines, we are members of a community and just because someone will pay you to do something doesn't mean you should.
        WalterBright 6y ago
        In a free market, you can decline to sell to Carol. In any case, the example is not compelling. It seems that making drugs illegal exacerbates the crime problems associated with drugs. It doesn't fix things. The War on Drugs is a near total failure.
        sthnblllII 6y ago
        My example illustrates pro-social incentives that are not captured by the profit motive.
    - atq2119 6y ago
      > > a wide range of human experience is lost > What is the most important human experience that is lost by markets? This is still the wrong way to look at it IMO. It's not that markets lose or destroy human experience, it's that it gets lost when we organize our society only via markets. It's also a bit of a silly question because everybody will have a different answer depending on their personal moral and value system, but generally it will be things that are not easily priced. Sticking with the theme of literacy of the overall discussion here, poetry comes to mind. Poetry has notoriously low market value, and really poems are almost inherently not a good to be traded on a market. They are rooted in an oral tradition of poems being shared in social settings. At least in my personal experience, this is still largely the case. And yet many (obviously not all) people value poetry to some extent, perhaps because there are some poems they find beautiful, or they tickle the brain in just the right way. But again, poetry is just one example and I'm not even saying that it's the most important one, it's just that they fit particularly well into the larger discussion here.
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        I have no idea how poetry gets lost in a market system. There is nothing whatsoever stopping you from writing poetry and sharing it as you wish in a free market. > not a good to be traded on a market Sure it is. Mostly in the form of music lyrics, but also people make and sell poetry books all the time. > And yet many (obviously not all) people value poetry to some extent I don't know anyone who doesn't like poetry in the form of a song. People still sing along in social settings, too, like concerts, church services and birthday parties. > It's also a bit of a silly question Not at all. I would expect someone posing the theory to at least have something at the top of their mind they're regarding as a problem example. For you it's poetry, and I showed that poetry isn't suffering in the least under the yoke of a market system.
        atq2119 6y ago
        > I have no idea how poetry gets lost in a market system. There is nothing whatsoever stopping you from writing poetry and sharing it as you wish in a free market. Right, but people end up writing and sharing poetry despite the market, not because of it. Poets tend to be rather poor, they aren't incentivized by money. If we organized our society in a way where money and markets were the only incentives, then poetry would be lost. That's what I keep repeating in the hope that maybe it will sink in eventually: It's not that markets actively destroy things like poetry. It's that markets don't help those things thrive despite people valuing them highly (which can of course lead to destruction indirectly by crowding out, but that's a separate point). This is because the correlation between what people value and what ends up having monetary value is too weak.[0] In theory one could try to fix that, but that has never worked in practice and there are good reasons why it never will. Trying to make it so is the same type of folly as trying to implement pure communism: it doesn't take human nature into account.[1] [0] As was also observed in a sibling thread where the discussion went to pricing externalities. [1] For what it's worth, this is a very common criticism of traditional microeconomics, i.e. humans really don't "work" in the way that traditional microeconomics says they do. The theory is built on a broken foundation. This is actually really well known among economists and why subfields like behavioural economics exist. For some reason this knowledge just doesn't percolate to the wider public.
- hh3k0 6y ago
  Meanwhile in reality it also entails people being manipulated into wanting something and people making and selling what no one needs.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    What things are you manipulated into wanting that you don't want, and what do you buy that you don't need? Why are you doing those things?
    - hh3k0 6y ago
      Much like nearly half of adult Canadians, you seem to struggle with literacy. And are you really going to pretend that manipulative marketing isn't a thing? Wow.
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        Rather than insult me, perhaps answering my question would more effectively make your point?
        hh3k0 6y ago
        Oh, I didn't insult you. And you'll see that your questions were quite off the mark if you actually read my original comment. But I'll gladly make my point once more: manipulative marketing is a thing.
        WalterBright 6y ago
        Your point has no value without an example.
        hh3k0 6y ago
        The anti-aging industry in its entirety, for starters. The vast majority of alternative medicine. The fashion industry is manipulative, the list goes on. Advertising is almost always manipulative -- tailored ads all the more. The ways in which consumers are manipulated are as innovative as they are plentiful: https://news.wsu.edu/2012/11/26/wsu-researchers-tie-simple-scent-to-increased-retail-sales/ https://news.wsu.edu/2012/11/26/wsu-researchers-tie-simple-s.... And you're either plain ignorant or blinded by ideology if you really needed all those examples.
- thundergolfer 6y ago
  That's a sycophantic way of framing market-dominated thinking, yes, but as other users have pointed out, market thinking having _primacy_ in society has downsides. Large downsides, in my opinion. Markets are a tool in service of humanity, but market dominated thinking abounds and we get this tweeted with a straight face by think-tank people: > I still believe in markets. Markets do not fail us. We fail markets. 1. https://twitter.com/AmityShlaes/status/1315793783951327234 https://twitter.com/AmityShlaes/status/1315793783951327234 Edit: I thought I recognised your username, and bet that you're the most upvoted user that's replied to me on this site. If you've written about your time on this site and how you got started on it, I'd be interested to read it.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    For a topical example, take the covid vaccine distribution system. It is done by the government, and has fared poorly in the US and Europe. The excuses are variations on "the states don't know how to set up a distribution system". But we already have a distribution system for vaccines. Where did you get your last flu shot? The local drug store, a market based system. I see the government busy trying to reproduce overnight an efficient, working system that's already there sitting idle. Of course they'll fail. I phoned my local drug store and asked if I can make an appointment for a covid vaccination. They replied they have no idea when or if they'd ever get any vaccination supply. Meanwhile, the state says they have a severe lack of people who can give vaccinations. (I know where they are hiding, they're behind the counter at your local pharmacy.) The solution is simple and stupidly obvious. Distribute vaccines to the zillion pharmacies, and pay them per vaccination in arm. They're not going to waste any time vaccinating people.
    - iguy 6y ago
      There's a lot of truth in this, but one catch is that the "zillion pharmacies" aren't set up for -70C storage. Although delivering each of them a small box of vaccine to be injected that same day sounds like a problem for which we also have well-established solutions... they're just busy delivering hamburgers.
- hkt 6y ago
  It obliterates a wide range of social settings, though. Running things in the community, often at a voluntary level that meant more investment locally, gave people a chance to meet and be involved. In the UK those spaces have been disappearing for generations.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    > It obliterates a wide range of social settings, though. What is the most important social setting that markets obliterate?
    - hkt 6y ago
      It is hard to pick one, really. But in the UK we squashed the following in the 1980s: Friendly societies (a type of customer owned insurer) Building societies (which used to be local, but are now essentially national scale banks) Various types of sports and social clubs (which often put on entertainment but also hosted lots of recreational activities) There is more, too, but these things got in the way of the financialised, neoliberal world that was under construction. What happened was policies then allowed them to change unrecognisably or just atrophy away to nothing. They all represented ways of being involved in the running of your community. Most are now irrelevant or gone.
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        They're gone simply because people found little reason to keep them. They've been replaced by social things HN where you and I are having a nice discussion. (Too bad it doesn't involve hefting a pint, sigh.) That wouldn't have happened in the 80's, when I communicated with Zortech in London with a daily fax.
        hkt 6y ago
        Sure, but most people haven't seen replacements for these things. Most of the discontent I see in politics comes from turning it into a spectator sport, rather than a way of describing the process of communities choosing things through the old organs of social democracy. But yes, there are new things and they are good. The internet pretty much raised me as a teenager. RE: pints, think I'd trade a finger for a pint with some good company at the moment. Alas.

WalterBright 6y ago

> Markets become the primary tool of societal organisation Another way to frame that is people buying what they want and people making and selling what other people want. Sounds good to me!

atq2119 6y ago
It's not that that's bad. It's that if everything is viewed only though this particular lens, a wide range of human experience is lost.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > a wide range of human experience is lost What is the most important human experience that is lost by markets?
  - helmholtz 6y ago
    85% of all animal life, receding glaciers, acidified, deadened oceans, plastic bag islands the size of Texas, depleted drinking water, dwindling natural resources, global uncontrolled rise of temperature, soil erosion, anti-microbial resistance, pandemics, factory farming animal abuse, forest fires, nuclear waste, asbestos in the lungs, lead in the veins, mercury in the nerves, global obesity... ETA: looks like you edited your comment. The original (and rather tone deaf) comment was: "I'm curious what is lost by people doing what they want to do."
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      I edited it to make it easier to answer. Your examples are not examples of a properly set up market system. They are spinning off what are called "externalities", which are costs not born by either the buyer or the seller. A properly set up market would apply those costs to the producer. An example of this is CO2 emission should be taxed, not regulated.
      - helmholtz 6y ago
        Ah, indeed, no true scotsman would pollute the planet, don't be daft! We are not blessed to be living in a perfect world that can be set up for an ideal market system. For the last four decades, these externalities have gotten ramped up to fever pitch. I'm interested in your take on how, in this world, we get to a point where ALL of the above consequences can be forestalled through HN's favourite hard-on: deregulation and market forces run amok.
        WalterBright 6y ago
        I have no idea how you're going to accomplish this with centralized economic planning, but there's a much better shot at it with a free market approach. Basically, taxing the externalities is the market based solution. Banning is a ham-fisted inefficient method.
        wcarey 6y ago
        How would price discovery operate on externalities? Who decides what's an externality? It seems like you're suggesting centralized planning under a different name.
        WalterBright 6y ago
        The government decides what is an externality and determines the tax rate. Two things governments are good at: taxing, and starting wars. Why not take advantage of the first? It even has the advantage of being a revenue source for the government, rather than a revenue sink. The government has to tax something, why not externalities? Around here, the government decided to tax plastic shopping bags. Geez, just put a tax on it instead. Raise the tax until plastic shopping bags become scarce enough. Then if someone really wants a plastic shopping bag to use, say, to clean up after their dog, they can if they're willing to pay. Much better than being charged with a crime.
  - sthnblllII 6y ago
    Markets are a means not an ends. Putting 'markets' first is a way of hiding your morally objectionable ends behind a "someone paid me to do it so it must be good" argument.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      Free markets come with the stipulation that Bob trading with Carol does not hurt uninvolved Ted.
      - sthnblllII 6y ago
        Bob knows Carol has a drug addiction. He sells Carol crack cocaine anyway. He has no guilt because the existence of a market for drugs means its ok, after all, Ted isn't harmed until Carol steals his tv to buy more crack. People are not machines, we are members of a community and just because someone will pay you to do something doesn't mean you should.
        WalterBright 6y ago
        In a free market, you can decline to sell to Carol. In any case, the example is not compelling. It seems that making drugs illegal exacerbates the crime problems associated with drugs. It doesn't fix things. The War on Drugs is a near total failure.
        sthnblllII 6y ago
        My example illustrates pro-social incentives that are not captured by the profit motive.
  - atq2119 6y ago
    > > a wide range of human experience is lost > What is the most important human experience that is lost by markets? This is still the wrong way to look at it IMO. It's not that markets lose or destroy human experience, it's that it gets lost when we organize our society only via markets. It's also a bit of a silly question because everybody will have a different answer depending on their personal moral and value system, but generally it will be things that are not easily priced. Sticking with the theme of literacy of the overall discussion here, poetry comes to mind. Poetry has notoriously low market value, and really poems are almost inherently not a good to be traded on a market. They are rooted in an oral tradition of poems being shared in social settings. At least in my personal experience, this is still largely the case. And yet many (obviously not all) people value poetry to some extent, perhaps because there are some poems they find beautiful, or they tickle the brain in just the right way. But again, poetry is just one example and I'm not even saying that it's the most important one, it's just that they fit particularly well into the larger discussion here.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      I have no idea how poetry gets lost in a market system. There is nothing whatsoever stopping you from writing poetry and sharing it as you wish in a free market. > not a good to be traded on a market Sure it is. Mostly in the form of music lyrics, but also people make and sell poetry books all the time. > And yet many (obviously not all) people value poetry to some extent I don't know anyone who doesn't like poetry in the form of a song. People still sing along in social settings, too, like concerts, church services and birthday parties. > It's also a bit of a silly question Not at all. I would expect someone posing the theory to at least have something at the top of their mind they're regarding as a problem example. For you it's poetry, and I showed that poetry isn't suffering in the least under the yoke of a market system.
      - atq2119 6y ago
        > I have no idea how poetry gets lost in a market system. There is nothing whatsoever stopping you from writing poetry and sharing it as you wish in a free market. Right, but people end up writing and sharing poetry despite the market, not because of it. Poets tend to be rather poor, they aren't incentivized by money. If we organized our society in a way where money and markets were the only incentives, then poetry would be lost. That's what I keep repeating in the hope that maybe it will sink in eventually: It's not that markets actively destroy things like poetry. It's that markets don't help those things thrive despite people valuing them highly (which can of course lead to destruction indirectly by crowding out, but that's a separate point). This is because the correlation between what people value and what ends up having monetary value is too weak.[0] In theory one could try to fix that, but that has never worked in practice and there are good reasons why it never will. Trying to make it so is the same type of folly as trying to implement pure communism: it doesn't take human nature into account.[1] [0] As was also observed in a sibling thread where the discussion went to pricing externalities. [1] For what it's worth, this is a very common criticism of traditional microeconomics, i.e. humans really don't "work" in the way that traditional microeconomics says they do. The theory is built on a broken foundation. This is actually really well known among economists and why subfields like behavioural economics exist. For some reason this knowledge just doesn't percolate to the wider public.
hh3k0 6y ago
Meanwhile in reality it also entails people being manipulated into wanting something and people making and selling what no one needs.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  What things are you manipulated into wanting that you don't want, and what do you buy that you don't need? Why are you doing those things?
  - hh3k0 6y ago
    Much like nearly half of adult Canadians, you seem to struggle with literacy. And are you really going to pretend that manipulative marketing isn't a thing? Wow.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      Rather than insult me, perhaps answering my question would more effectively make your point?
      - hh3k0 6y ago
        Oh, I didn't insult you. And you'll see that your questions were quite off the mark if you actually read my original comment. But I'll gladly make my point once more: manipulative marketing is a thing.
        WalterBright 6y ago
        Your point has no value without an example.
        hh3k0 6y ago
        The anti-aging industry in its entirety, for starters. The vast majority of alternative medicine. The fashion industry is manipulative, the list goes on. Advertising is almost always manipulative -- tailored ads all the more. The ways in which consumers are manipulated are as innovative as they are plentiful: https://news.wsu.edu/2012/11/26/wsu-researchers-tie-simple-scent-to-increased-retail-sales/ https://news.wsu.edu/2012/11/26/wsu-researchers-tie-simple-s.... And you're either plain ignorant or blinded by ideology if you really needed all those examples.
thundergolfer 6y ago
That's a sycophantic way of framing market-dominated thinking, yes, but as other users have pointed out, market thinking having _primacy_ in society has downsides. Large downsides, in my opinion. Markets are a tool in service of humanity, but market dominated thinking abounds and we get this tweeted with a straight face by think-tank people: > I still believe in markets. Markets do not fail us. We fail markets. 1. https://twitter.com/AmityShlaes/status/1315793783951327234 https://twitter.com/AmityShlaes/status/1315793783951327234 Edit: I thought I recognised your username, and bet that you're the most upvoted user that's replied to me on this site. If you've written about your time on this site and how you got started on it, I'd be interested to read it.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  For a topical example, take the covid vaccine distribution system. It is done by the government, and has fared poorly in the US and Europe. The excuses are variations on "the states don't know how to set up a distribution system". But we already have a distribution system for vaccines. Where did you get your last flu shot? The local drug store, a market based system. I see the government busy trying to reproduce overnight an efficient, working system that's already there sitting idle. Of course they'll fail. I phoned my local drug store and asked if I can make an appointment for a covid vaccination. They replied they have no idea when or if they'd ever get any vaccination supply. Meanwhile, the state says they have a severe lack of people who can give vaccinations. (I know where they are hiding, they're behind the counter at your local pharmacy.) The solution is simple and stupidly obvious. Distribute vaccines to the zillion pharmacies, and pay them per vaccination in arm. They're not going to waste any time vaccinating people.
  - iguy 6y ago
    There's a lot of truth in this, but one catch is that the "zillion pharmacies" aren't set up for -70C storage. Although delivering each of them a small box of vaccine to be injected that same day sounds like a problem for which we also have well-established solutions... they're just busy delivering hamburgers.
hkt 6y ago
It obliterates a wide range of social settings, though. Running things in the community, often at a voluntary level that meant more investment locally, gave people a chance to meet and be involved. In the UK those spaces have been disappearing for generations.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > It obliterates a wide range of social settings, though. What is the most important social setting that markets obliterate?
  - hkt 6y ago
    It is hard to pick one, really. But in the UK we squashed the following in the 1980s: Friendly societies (a type of customer owned insurer) Building societies (which used to be local, but are now essentially national scale banks) Various types of sports and social clubs (which often put on entertainment but also hosted lots of recreational activities) There is more, too, but these things got in the way of the financialised, neoliberal world that was under construction. What happened was policies then allowed them to change unrecognisably or just atrophy away to nothing. They all represented ways of being involved in the running of your community. Most are now irrelevant or gone.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      They're gone simply because people found little reason to keep them. They've been replaced by social things HN where you and I are having a nice discussion. (Too bad it doesn't involve hefting a pint, sigh.) That wouldn't have happened in the 80's, when I communicated with Zortech in London with a daily fax.
      - hkt 6y ago
        Sure, but most people haven't seen replacements for these things. Most of the discontent I see in politics comes from turning it into a spectator sport, rather than a way of describing the process of communities choosing things through the old organs of social democracy. But yes, there are new things and they are good. The internet pretty much raised me as a teenager. RE: pints, think I'd trade a finger for a pint with some good company at the moment. Alas.