[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.

Why exactly should people like the system that is the closest thing we have to unfriendly intelligence, paperclip maximizer style, and which is probably the best example in favour of the SI's beliefs? This is weird.

Also, the markets are all too closely approximated by a system of very simple agents betting on random, few ending up rich, most ending up poor, and distribution ending up very similar to reality (power law distribution). I don't see why we should like a system that would produce power law distribution on identically skilled agents.

You focus on the bad aspects of markets (they make some people rich, using some randomness) and ignore the good aspects (many people have their needs satisfied better than if they had to do everything for themselves). Maybe this is what most people do -- we take the good parts for granted and complain about the bad parts.

An analogy would be an unfriendly intelligence (powerful but not FOOMing; sometimes creating food, sometimes paperclips) that would make many people say: "intelligence is bad, we should destroy all computers, and hope that the next generations of humans have less IQ so this problem will not happen again". -- The hate makes sense, the solution does not.

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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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