[Link] Why don't people like markets?

GLaDOS

An interesting piece with speculation on possible reasons for why people seem to be biased against markets. To summarize:

Market processes are not visible. For instance, when a government taxes its citizens and offers a subsidy to some producers, what is seen is the money taken and the money received. What is unseen is the amount of production that would occur in the absence of such transfers.
Markets are intrinsically probabilistic and therefore marked with uncertainty, like other living organisms, we are loss-averse and try to minimise uncertainty
Humans may be motivated to place their trust in processes that are (or at least seem to be) driven by agents rather than impersonal factors.

The last point reminded me of speculation from the recent LessWrong article Conspiracy Theories as Agency Fictions:

Do all theories of legitimacy also perhaps rest on the same cognitive failings that conspiracy theories do? The difference between a shadowy cabal we need to get rid of and an institution worthy of respect may be just some bad luck.

Before thinking about these points and debating them I strongly recommend you read the full article.

An interesting piece with speculation on possible reasons for why people seem to be biased against markets. To summarize:

Market processes are not visible. For instance, when a government taxes its citizens and offers a subsidy to some producers, what is seen is the money taken and the money received. What is unseen is the amount of production that would occur in the absence of such transfers.
Markets are intrinsically probabilistic and therefore marked with uncertainty, like other living organisms, we are loss-averse and try to minimise uncertainty
Humans may be motivated to place their trust in processes that are (or at least seem to be) driven by agents rather than impersonal factors.

The last point reminded me of speculation from the recent LessWrong article Conspiracy Theories as Agency Fictions:

Do all theories of legitimacy also perhaps rest on the same cognitive failings that conspiracy theories do? The difference between a shadowy cabal we need to get rid of and an institution worthy of respect may be just some bad luck.

Before thinking about these points and debating them I strongly recommend you read the full article.

What if someone dislikes markets because they saw markets cause unhappiness or inequality on some random occasion? Surely that would be a valid cognitive explanation.

Well, one could ask why negative effects are more likely to be attributed to markets, whereas positive effects to be attributed to other factors or simply taken for granted.

Is it really the case? For start I'd like to have an objective and not entirely arbitrary way of measuring how much likely various effects are attributed to markets and other factors. Speculations framed as "why people dislike X" by someone who happens to like X are always suspect of tribal politics, especially when the suggested answer points to some failure of rationality. Of course, such speculations aren't necessarily useless because of that, but one should at least be certain that one is trying to explain a real phenomenon.

5Viliam_Bur14y

Because people are better at signalling. Whenever something good happens, there is a person ready to take credit for that, deserved or not. Markets are good at signalling about individual products or companies (advertising), but not about the concept of "market" per se.

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[Link] Why don't people like markets?

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[Link] Why don't people like markets?

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