this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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Or trade secrets. "Perfect information" is a bitch. Not to speak of "perfectly rational actors": Say goodbye to advertisement, too, we'd have to outlaw basically all of it.
To be fair, we absolutely should outlaw at least 99% of all currently practiced forms of advertising and make it so that new forms of advertising have to be whitelisted by a panel of psychiatrists, sociologists, environmentalists and urban planners before they're allowed.
Trade secrets don't need to be enforced much by law. You can create an ad hoc trade secret regime by simply keeping your secret between a few key employees. As it happens, there are some laws that go beyond that to help companies keep the secret, but that only extends something that could happen naturally.
To get closer to the free market there would have to be a duty to disclose any- and everything that's now a trade secret, no matter how easily kept. To not just get closer but actually get there we all would need to be telepathic. As said, perfect information is a bitch of a concept.
Being free to innovate and keep your own ideas to yourself sounds like it should be part of the free market though.
Forcing people to disclose their (mental) secrets seems bizarre.
I'm not arguing for any policies, just explaining what would be necessary to make the theoretical model of the free market a reality in actual reality: It assumes perfect information and perfectly rational actors, it's a tall order.
What definition are you going by?
Adam Smith's. He pioneered rational choice models in general. Came up with the whole shebang that 20yold econ 101 students love to ignore in favour of "free market is if I get a fat payout".
And why should I listen to someone that defines a word differently than everyone else?
Adam Smith came up with it. It's also how actual economists use it. Don't confuse that with how business majors, politicians, and generally peddlers of institutionalised market failure use it.
Can you point to a few examples of economists using it? Obviously I won't count Lemmy users.
In the hardcore contemporary literature you mostly see more precise language such as perfect competition, (theoretical) situations which are pareto-optimal, which is built on Adam's rational choice models. The maths became more solid, the idea didn't change. They didn't have game theory back then.
And FFS read The Wealth of Nations and see what he thought of monopolists he'd consider our billionaires to be no different than the kings of old. The father of capitalism was out for universal wealth and happiness, not personal enrichment.
You honestly seem obsessed with that adam dude.
I think your problem is that you seem to think that "perfect" mathematical models will ever work in real life.
I said the exact opposite the whole thread. Are you confusing me with a capitalist or something.
It's all you talk about though.
No one cares about Adam when his ideas are frankly stupid. Or at least how you describe them. He might be a solid dude.
It's all you fucking asked about.
Are you telling me that the axioms behind the simplistic model are wrong??
shocked-pikachu.jpgIt's not so much that they're wrong is that they're impossible in practice. Axioms, by their very nature, cannot be justified from within the system that they serve so "true" or "false" aren't really applicable.
The model does have its justification, "given these axioms, we indeed get perfect allocation of resources", that's not wrong it's a mathematical truth, and there's a strain of liberalism (ordoliberalism) which specifically says "the state should regulate so that the actually existing market more closely approximates this mythical free market unicorn", which is broadly speaking an immensely sensible take and you'll have market socialists nodding in agreement, yep, that's a good idea.
And then there's another strain (neoliberalism) which basically says "lul we'll tell people that 'free market' means 'unregulated market' so we can be feudal lords and siphon off infinite amounts of resources from the plebs".
Wrong as in not sound. An argument can be valid assuming its assumptions are true. The argument is the model, which really is a set of arguments. Its assumptions which are taken axiomatically are as you say impossible, therefore they are not true (which I called wrong). So the argument is not sound. I'm not saying anything different than what you said really, just used informal language. ☺️
Its assumptions are inconsistent with the conditions in the material world, but that doesn't make the model itself unsound. A model is not an argument, definitely not in the political sense, it's just a model.
You can also include the model in the material world, as was done, at the very least, when the paper introducing it was published and that doesn't make the material world unsound, either: The model lives in organic computation machines which implement paraconsistent logic in a way that does not, contrary to an assumption popular among those computation machines, make those paradoxes real in the material realm they're embedded in.
Everything is, ultimately, sound, because the universe, nay, cause and effect itself, does not just shatter willy-nilly. "ex falso quodlibet" would have rather interesting implications, physics-wise. For one, an infinite amount of Boltzmann brains would haunt an infinite amount of physicists.