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> > 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

> > 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.

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.