Harry Pollard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>At 08:57 PM 10/5/1997 GMT, [Eva Durant] wrote:
>>(Harry Pollard wrote:)
>
>>> But, somehow the market sometimes fails to work. Attention would
>>>better be
>>> spent finding why instead of replacing it with it's alternatives - which
>>> have mostly failed horribly whenever they are tried.
>>>
>>
>>You name it, it has been tried. Free market, keynesian market,
>>monetarist market, all end up in failure sooner or later.
>
>Add socialism - then ask why?
I think the real problem is in the mechanics of it. The idea behind all
economic systems is to provide for the public good; to devise a mechanism
whereby a stable society can flourish. The market system (of whatever
stripe) tries to do this by fashioning an environment where private
motivation (greed, selfishness or simply the desire to acquire the
basic necessities for survival), is harnessed to serve the public good.
The problem is in how this is accomplished: it is never perfectly
successful. Failures in design result in inefficiencies due to any
combination of too much, too little, or the wrong kind of controls
on private activity.
Harnessing individual selfishness effectively is an engineering problem,
like how to arrange the wheel in the hamster cage for maximum spin.
It's something that requires conscious intelligent and recurrent
design, using all the tools available to the engineer, including
computer modelling and free space for idle tweeking. It's not going
to be solved by adherence to any sort of simple sloganeering approach
to economics. There are an infinite number of economic systems which
can be envisioned, with different divisions between the domain of
individual effort and collective will. The limit to what could be
modelled is your imagination. We could divide the dry land of the
planet equally among its human inhabitants, or leave everything
to private control except the collective public management of all
meals and food preparation, or we could... anything. I see it as a
very complex but not intractable problem, one best solved by leaving
behind all and any political baggage, and dealing with the nuts and
bolts.
Just my two cents...
-Pete Vincent
