> 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 mark

> 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.