3 FREE MARKET pt.2 - ΥΠΑΡΧΕΙ ΚΑΤΙ ΣΑΠΙΟ ΣΤΟ ΒΑΣΣΙΛΕΙΟΝ ΤΗΣ ΔΑΝΗΜΑΡΚΙΑΣ?
Φυσικά, δεν είναι όλα ρόδινα ούτε απλά. Πάρτε για παράδειγμα το πλεονέκτημα 3. Αν ο Ντράγκονλορντ εχει 2000 ρούβλια και όλοι οι άλλοι χρήστες του φόρουμ έχουμε απο δέκα καπίκια, η ελεύθερη αγορά ΔΕΝ μπορει να απαντήσει στο προβλημα ποιός θα χρησιμοποιήσει τα παραγόμενα αγαθά. Η λειτουργία της αγοράς, βασίζεται σε ορισμένες προυποθέσεις, όταν αυτές δεν υπάρχουν, το σύστημα της ελέυθερης αγοράς χάνει τα πλεονεκτήματά του. Πότε καταρέει η λειτουργία της αγοράς? Ο Delong πάλι απαντά:
I count seven ways that market economies can and do go badly wrong:
First, the market will go wrong if the wealth distribution is wrong. The market judges value by willingness to pay, and the rich are much more willing to pay them the poor, and those without wealth or income have no willingness to pay at all. If your wealth and income are zero, then the market literally does not care whether you live or die--it is of no interest to it at all.
Second, the market will go wrong if commodities do not have the proper characteristics. Remember: rivalry, excludability, and also information--people have to know what they are buying. An absence of or imperfect rivalry--increasing returns to scale in production or consumption of any sort--and the market will go wrong. An absence of or imperfect excludability--free-rider problems of any sort, or any failure of property rights definition or enforcement--and the market will go wrong. An absence of good information about exactly what you are buying or selling--adverse selection or moral hazard problems of any sort--and the market will go wrong.
Third, the market will go wrong if market agents do not take the prices at which they buy and sell as given but rather have some control over the prices at which they transact. The belief that the market is efficient hinges on the absence of market power--as well as on the proper income distribution, and on the proper characteristics of commodities.
Fourth, the market will go wrong if prices do not equalize quantities supplied and quantities demanded at every moment. "Price stickiness" for any sociological or psychological reasons disrupts the market's ability to function.
Fifth, the market will go wrong if Say's Law breaks down. If there is substantial downward pressure on spending on currently-produced goods and services because of an excess demand for financial assets of a kind that the private sector cannot immediately and instantaneously generate on a large scale, then the market will go wrong and we will have a downturn and a depression. If there is substantial upward pressure on spending on currently-produced goods and services because of an excess supply of financial assets of a kind that the private sector cannot immediately and instantaneously shed, then the market will go wrong and we will have a burst of inflation that will disrupt the functioning of the price system.
Sixth, the market will go wrong whenever its prices function as forecasting mechanisms. A proper forecasting mechanism would weigh each individual's opinion by the precision of his or her knowledge. A market tends on the contrary to weigh each individual's opinion by his or her wealth. This means that whenever economic processes tend to revert to seem average level that the market is likely to get things wrong, for when prices rise above average those who are optimistic become richer and their opinions carry more weight and so prices tend to rise further above their likely long-run fundamental values. Bubbles and crashes, manias and panics, are thus built into the system.
Seventh, the market will go wrong whenever individuals are bad judges of their own long-term interests--note that I say when, not if. Humans are very bad at assessing and dealing with risk. Humans are not that great at appropriately weighting different conflicting pieces of information. And humans are absolutely horrible at dealing with substances or patterns of behavior that can be addictive.
Whenever the system falls into any one of these seven arenas of psychological, behavioral, or institutional myopia and market failure, the market will go wrong. A good government will put its thumb on the scale in order to offset all of these seven forms of market failure. A great government will have foresight and take care to structure political-economic institutions to make these seven arenas of myopia and market failure as small as possible.
Remember this too. Keep it as an active process running on your wetware always. Lay up this idea in your heart and in your soul. Bind it for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes. Teach it to your children when thou sittest in thine house, when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates: that thy days and the days of thy children--or at least the commodities they own--may be multiplied.
Ορισμένες κοινωνίες, ή κοινωνικές τάξεις, θεωρούν οτι υπάρχει κάτι το "Ηθικό" με το σύστημα της ελεύθερης αγοράς. Αυτό οδηγεί συχνά χώρες στο να ακολουθούν πιστά το σύστημα, ακόμα και όταν αυτό δυσλειτουργεί. Μεγαλύτερη μαλακία απο αυτό δεν υπάρχει. Οι σοβαρές κοινωνίες δεν χρησιμοποιουν το σύστημα της ελεύθερης αγοράς επειδή είναι πιό ηθικό, το χρησιμοποιούν επειδή λειτουργεί και επεμβαίνουν για να διορθώσουν όπου χρειάζεται. Πάνω σε αυτό, ο Paul Krugman, νομπελίστας καθηγητής στο Princeton γράφει:
The first thing one should say is that our system does reward hard work, up to a point. Other things equal, those who put more in will earn more.
But a lot of other things are, in fact, not remotely equal. These days, America is the advanced nation with the least social mobility (pdf), except possibly for Britain. Access to good schools, good health care, and job opportunities depends on lot on choosing the right parents.
Now, inequality of opportunity is only one reason for the inequality in outcomes we actually see. But of what remains, how much reflects individual effort, how much reflects talent, and how much sheer luck? No reasonable person would deny that there’s a lot of luck involved. Wall Street titans are, no doubt, smart guys (although talking to some of them, you have to wonder …), but there are surely equally smart guys who for whatever reason never got a chance to grab the 9-figure brass ring.
That doesn’t mean the order we have should be overthrown: the pursuit of Utopia, of perfect economic justice, has proved to be the road to hell, while welfare-state capitalism — a market economy with its rough edges smoothed by a strong safety net — has produced the most decent societies ever known. The point, though, is that anyone who claims that transferring some income from the most fortunate members of society to the least is a vile injustice is closing his eyes to the obvious reality of how the world works
