[Link] Why don't people like markets?

Markets, at least in their modern incarnation, are evolutionarily novel. According to Debt: The First 5,000 Years, hunter-gatherers traded not just by barter but by social indebtedness. We see that today; when my friends and I grab lunch, it feels natural to say "Don't worry, I got this; you can pick up the tab next time." There's a definite Dunbar limit to how large these networks can grow; get beyond that and you're in evolutionarily novel territory.

As an aside, the notion that economic inequality is evolutionary novel offers quite a bit of insight into why we treat wealth inequality vastly differently than status inequalities.

This part rubs me the wrong way:

PS - Some people may be tempted to tell me that people fear markets simply because markets are destructive, evil, create unhappiness and inequality, etc. That obviously is not the answer, just like "people believe in spirits because there are spirits" is not a cognitive explanation of supernatural concepts.

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. Digging deeper to find imaginary biases like "he dislikes markets because they're driven by impersonal factors" would be wrong in such cases.

It seems likely that the reason people dislike markets is simpler than has been postulated. For every person, they will have pet issues. The market will simply ignore most of them. Thus, the people blame the market for not getting what they want. They will wish to distort the market to get their specific item, that is, to destroy the market.* They won't agree on how to change it, but the destruction will be agreed upon.

*The market does not care about your issue unless there is an outlandish amount of money you are willing to pay, either alone or in aggregate.

**Even small distortions can vastly change the outcome in an unfavorable (to efficiency) direction. The recent quasi-depression can be blamed at least in part on such a distortion in the housing market.

From the article:

PS - Some people may be tempted to tell me that people fear markets simply because markets are destructive, evil, create unhappiness and inequality, etc. That obviously is not the answer

Or like how "people believe in dogs because there are dogs" obviously cannot be the answer to why people believe in dogs.

In short, I think this article is highly suspect. It assumes a lot of non-obvious stuff as "obvious", including the very premise that people don't like markets as much as they should.

I think a large part of the problem is that people tend to identify with their governments and thus overestimate how much government regulators will act in their interests.

Don't judiciaries share all these properties? Is there a comparable level of mistrust in systems of justice?

Come to think of it, don't systems like internet infrastructure or language also share those properties? Aside from a few niche groups, I don't think either of those have a significant amount of mistrust levied against them.

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.

The anti-capitalistic mentality is a worthwhile read if you find this avenue interesting. (warning: Austrian econ) http://mises.org/etexts/anticap.pdf

Some people like them, and some don't. Those who don't do so for various reasons.

I won't go into the economic arguments. Or even the moral ones.

I'll just observer that some people wish to be slaves. You may think that's harsh, but I think it's just an accurate observation. Some people have a will to servitude. They wish to find someone or something to obey.

And if they're going to obey, you damn well will too. Whether one is a slave to God, The Church, Society, or The Party probably is largely a matter of happenstance, of where you happened to grow up . Some people want to live in a world of obedience.

A market transaction means someone, somewhere got to make their own choice, to decide for themselves, instead of merely obey. That's why some people don't like markets - they don't want people free to chose.

What are markets that people dislike? If it is that people dislike large unregulated markets. there are some more reasons...

First, large markets encourage forming monopolies. Many people have personal gripes of ths kind: there was a relatively small company or a niche company that produced a product that was a good fit. It got bought by a larger company and now produces utterly unusable product in order to avoid competing with low-quality offering of the buying company. Also, any anti-trust case you have heard of is enabled by large-scale markets: you need national market for an antitrust case to make national news. Availability heuristic adds to the perception that "large markets = large and abusive monopoles", which is sometimes true and sometimes not true.

Second, markets are not simply "inherently probabilistic". Large-scale high-liquidity markets produce randomness that they call volatility. Price changes in exchanges do not change drastically more on Monday than on Wednesday, although on Monday there are two days worth news without to incorporate into prices (even if we are speaking about some natural-events-depending commmodity like agricultural produce where there are more weather predictions than mergers). News mentioning markets do not try to hide this.

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.