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My argument is that market forces have done a brilliant job in marshalling far-flung and diverse interests to optimize for the sum total of our self-interests.

My argument is that market forces have done a brilliant job in marshalling far-flung and diverse interests to optimize for the sum total of our self-interests. For instance, I'm using this device for fun and profit and it was made by actual communists on the other side of the planet. People until recently have not thought of the ecology as being in their personal interest in a direct and concrete way, only a vague and diffused good. Tragedy of the commons and all that. But that's changed because now being green can be cheaper (carbon tax, cheap solar panels, other tech progress) and cool. The market deals with all long-term significant problems this way - leave it until it's urgent, then absolutely smash it. This isn't perfect but it's probably the only way to get 8 billion decision-makers to coordinate on anything.

crispinb 4y ago
My point isn't for perfection, but that we simply don't deal with many global problems at all, ever. They're not left 'till they're urgent - they are ignored until they overwhelm. This is a universal, physical, biological process that happens to all organisms whose unchecked growth damages the environment they have evolved to exist in. Abstractions like 'market forces', 'self interest' and 'decision-makers' have no causal force. They are like money - concepts that skate impotently over the surface of physical reality, until their bearers are borne away. Anyway, 'arguments' (especially those of economists - the theologians of our era, whose intellectual fairy-castles will in my view come to be seen as equally empty) are irrelevant. Rationalism lost (a historical reality economists never grappled with). Empirical reality is all. Time will tell.