Related to: Eliezer's Sequences and Mainstream Academia, Intellectual insularity and productivity, I Stand by the Sequences, Why don't people like markets?
Looking at some of the more recent arguments against them showing up in discussions I've been quite disappointed, they seem betray a sort of lack of background knowledge or opinions built up from a bottom line of "markets are baaad therefore prediction markets are baaad". The casual arguments for them are lacking as well. I will say the same of other discussions on economic, since it is apparently suddenly too mind-killing or too political to talk about markets and similar things at all. We didn't use to have tribal alerts flying up in our brains discussing such matters.
The Overcoming Bias community started with an assumption of certain kinds of background knowledge, this included economics and things like game theory. In the early days of LessWrong/Overcoming Bias Eliezer did a whole sequnece on filling in people on Quantum mechanics which despite his claims to the contrary doesn't seem that vital (if still important).
We now have a different demographic that we used to. Not only that, we now have young people basically using the sequences as their primary source for education on matters of human rationality, quite different from the autodidacts exploring the literature on their own terms who where common in previous years. We've recognized this to a certain extent. We wrote a series of introductory sequences and articles to fill in such background knowledge explicitly such as Yvain's recent one on Game Theory. Also part of the reason we now have a norm of more citations that EY originally did is to give study and research aids to people. Indeed I think adding comments to old articles featuring more citations or editing those in would be wise so as to avoid misconceptions.
I think we need several sequences on economics, and a good one to start would be one systematically investigating prediction markets. To a certain extent just reading Robin Hanson's relevant posts on this topic would do much the same, but unfortunately we don't have an organized series of sequences by him (beyond the tags he uses on his articles). I still hope Karmakaiser or someone else will one day undertake a project of writing up summary articles that organize links to RH's posts into sequences so new members will read them as well.
I'd write these myself but I just don't have a good background in what works and studies influence the positions of early key LW authors on economics and its relevance to rationality. I'm also only beginning my studies in that area since my background is in the hard sciences with only some half-serious opinions formed from Moldbuggian insights and 20th century social science.
In case the link to my comment inadvertently implies otherwise:
I also agree it would be fantastic to have sequences which explain economics from first principles, especially the results of informed consensus, such as the value of markets, which are not yet non-expert consensus. Educating people, even on controversial topics, would be much less mind-killing than starting from the question of how we can fix all those mistaken people. Keep the Principle of Charity in mind.
When you compare market- and non-market-oriented economics you're talking about centuries-old disagreements that contributed to wars and the Cold War, mistakes that led to massive famines, philosophies that underpin whole political parties, and concerns that still have angry people marching and camping out in political protests in cities around the globe. If you think that the topic isn't political or that its connection to politics was a sudden development, you haven't been paying attention. Maybe no amount of careful reasoning from first principles will convince Charlie Stross (or anyone already committed to anti-market beliefs) that those "smugly self-satisfied hypercapitalists" might be on to something after all, but it's important to at least write while keeping in mind that your audience and theirs overlap.
Nitpick: when it comes to social sciences, probably no amount of careful reasoning from first principles should convince anyone. Theory is useful, but when it comes to applying it to something as messy as human behavior, you'll want to have lots of experimental data to back it up before being convinced.