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> “Supposed” by whom? It’s fundamentally what a market is. It’s like me saying a sorting algorithm is supposed to produce a sorted set, and you saying ‘“Suppo

• dragonwriter 4y ago
  > It’s fundamentally what a market is? No, it's not. Fundamentally a market is the aggregate of individual actions to exchange goods at values that seem to make sense based on conditions at the moment of exchange. What you described is approximately a common aspirational view of what hypothetical ideal markets would achieve, not fundamentally “what a market is”. > It’s like me saying a sorting algorithm is supposed to produce a sorted set, and you saying ‘“Supposed” by whom?’ If a “sorted set” was not a well-defined, or even practically operationalizable concept, but merely a thing about which people had conflicting intuitions, and instead of an abstract ideal an “algorithm” was a class of real things that exist in the physical universe, and the ones that you named did not, in fact, produce anything that met most intuitions of what the might fit the ill-defined concept of a “sorted set”, your analogy would be spot on.