Conversation

“Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.” — unknown “Good markets are merely the slowest possible rate of political failure” — me
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A weird “externality” of markets we usually forget about: extension of the economic life of counterparties you may detest (often hidden behind layers of intermediation) with every transaction. Scare quotes because it’s not an objective consensus externality like pollution.
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Your urgency-importance tradeoff + your uncertainties + concentration effects = more pluralism than you may want. And it’s not a “distortion” caused by cronyism or imperfect information. Would exist due to complexity+finiteness alone.
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Generally this pluralism surplus is a good check against absolutism. You may be shouting anti-China slogans using cheap megaphones made in China for example. It’s basically impossible to “sanitize” your personal supply chain to be 100% “ethically sourced” by your values.
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Still, if you think a “better world” or even “sustaining current world” by your standards requires the political failure of actors you think stand in the way, markets are the slowest way of ensuring their failure. Which may be too slow if you happen to be objectively right.
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Basically, you cannot use market failures to cause political failures on a useful time scale. The market can remain immoral by your standards longer than you can stay solvent. If you want to (for instance) take down Big Coal or factory farming, you have to go at them directly.
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By which I mean extra-market competition via PR or hostile regulation designed to shrink/scuttle rather than regulate sustainably. Basically political ends cannot be achieved via market means. Markets will always be too late for that, though they can be very fast in other ways.
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This is one reason why market fundamentalism and political conservatism get along so well. Political conservatism assumes by default that things that exist should continue existing as long as possible, even at the expense of choking the new. Lindy effect as normative principle.
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Getting enough political control authority to “steer” markets is exactly the same problem as governing AIs. Not just an analogy. I suspect you could reduce both to the same technical problem.
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