Political scientist Jonathan Schlefer states the obvious — and infuriates economists in the process.
There Is No Invisible Hand – Jonathan Schlefer – Harvard Business Review.
Read the comments to witness the not-so-invisible finger his proclamation is getting from the economists.
It could be worse for Schlefer — he could be a philosopher!
I found the following comment especially interesting:
“Proving the case for free markets does not require that they lead to stability, optimality, or even prosperity; they just have to do better than human tinkering. That’s not a high hurdle.”
It appears to be a reiteration of common libertarian ideology. In other words, the market is magnitudes more efficient and perceptive at organizing and distributing goods and information than people themselves, and so it is more desirable for markets to manage the economy than to entrust such management to a few people, such as a governing body.
But this argument is founded on an implicit distrust and derision of people and their capacities as contributing citizens, and also a mistake concerning the identity of ‘markets’ – markets ultimately reflect the decisions and goals of people, with everything that entails. To say that markets are self-correcting according to an ‘invisible hand’ is to propel human agency (most often in the form of vested political interests and various degrees of political/financial corruption) to the realm of mystical machinations. It buries the source of a market’s ‘self-corrections’ – decisions made and ideas held by those who have enough power to influence the trajectory of a market – behind a constructed patina of objectivity and therefore preempts any opportunity to bring democracy to bear on markets. Citizens are left with few options regarding action, for how can one demand accountability from a spectre?
In sum, markets are essentially the product of human tinkering. To say that people, especially governmental institutions, ought to simply ‘leave them be’ is to entrust our autonomy to technological creations, and yet expect to remain free.