[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.

Downvoting this as too political, but:

The "driven by agents rather than impersonal factors" is spot-on.

If your preferred system centralizes power, then when it doesn't give you a desired result you can always defend the system by diagnosing the problem as a failure to put The Right People in charge.

But who do you blame if a market doesn't give you a desired result? E.g., after the hurricane hits, when portable generators are going for a 500% markup, it's hard to rationally blame "the price gougers" when that term could be expanded out as "the people who are offering you the lowest price of anyone in the world". A hundred times as many sellers would be willing to deliver you a generator at 5000% markup, and surely any ire aimed at the former group shouldn't spare the latter. So if you realize (even subconsciously) that you can't get mad at everyone in the world, but you still want to get mad, you have to conclude that somehow "the system" itself (perhaps embodied by some "middleman minority" surrogate) deserves your anger.

Downvoting this as too political, but:

This is highly relevant to lesswrong - markets are one of the best information aggregation mechanisms available and so understanding why people oppose markets is useful.

10GLaDOS14y

O.o Downvoting your comment. I think you need to reread this article. It doesn't go as far as you seem to think it does. I very much dobut many people on LessWrong are mindkilled by talking about markets. I mean seriously we talk economics and cognitive bias with potential political implications all the time. Indeed it would be impossible to do otherwise. [...] Looking at some of the comments citing politics as the mindkiller and comparing it to the article Eliezer wrote, this norm has clearly mutated beyond reason. It has now been applied to everything from biology, sociology, sexuality and even recently to religion. There needs to be some counter push to this norm creep.