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Comment by phillmv

>This is such an important point, and why free markets work best.

Well, there's a subtlety there.

It's not that "free markets work best". It's that the efficient market hypothesis claims that a market with perfect information dissemination consisting of uniformly rational agents will deliver Pareto-optimal resource allocations.

There's a lot to disagree with in that sentence; market agents collude, people are demonstrably irrational/rely on cognitive heuristics and just because something is Pareto efficient doesn't mean it's fair or equitable.

All three are valid critiques, and the case in point in TFA - the market allocated money to Yo, but that doesn't mean a priori that funding Yo is a worthy and moral choice.

So, if we have markets that routinely deliver inequitable outcomes it's perfectly reasonable to ask - why is this happening?

parent phillmv 12 years ago

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