[marginalium]
The failure of market knows best economics
13 Jun 2023
The failure of market knows best economics:
the “market knows best” paradigm is in disrepair. It isn’t just that “hyperglobalization” has devoured its own preconditions, so that it is increasingly unsustainable. It is also that some goals of modern industrial policy are in principle impossible to solve through purely market mechanisms. To the extent, for example, that economics and national security have become interwoven, investment and innovation decisions involve tradeoffs that market actors are poorly equipped to resolve … We lack the kinds of expertise that we need to achieve key goals of industrial policy, or to evaluate the tradeoffs between them. … Decades of insistence that economic decisions be handed off from the state to markets has resulted in a remarkable lack of understanding among government policy makers about how markets, in fact, work.
Anthologies: Betterment, Wealth Architecture, Accidental Civilisation, From Zero, On Being Fruitful, On Politics and Power