Ok, so the fundamental theorems are sort of relevant to my question. My question asks for a combination of reasoning like in those theorems, with empirical information about parameters like bounded reasoning, imperfect information, mortal agents, agents with complicated boundaries, etc. AFAIK in those conditions, there could be weird attractors that mean dumb-seeming stuff like government actually makes sense. I’m pretty confident that we could describe a coherent world that’s vastly superior just by changing the (hypothetical) government away from our actual one. What I’m asking about is the forces that have to be contended with to make that work.
My question asks for a combination of reasoning like in those theorems, with empirical information about parameters like bounded reasoning, imperfect information, mortal agents, agents with complicated boundaries, etc. AFAIK in those conditions, there could be weird attractors that mean dumb-seeming stuff like government actually makes sense.
That seems like a tall order. Instead of making very general assumptions about agents (which limits the usefulness of mathematical results), it would probably make more sense in this context to talk about empirical analysis. We can ask questions like, do societies that use democratic governments to solve certain types of coordination problems X, generally do better across some metric Y? Economists have been studying problems like this for centuries.
I’m pretty confident that we could describe a coherent world that’s vastly superior just by changing the (hypothetical) government away from our actual one.
Sure. The field of mechanism design tries to build hypothetical economic systems that would work better than the ones we currently have.
> Economists have been studying problems like this for centuries.
Great. So my question is, what if any are the arguments “that market structures usually do a better job at solving coordination problems than government”. E.g. by giving an equilibrium analysis of a spherical-cow version of the most sweatshop-inducing realistic assumptions that shows that the market nevertheless doesn’t produce sweatshops.
Ok, so the fundamental theorems are sort of relevant to my question. My question asks for a combination of reasoning like in those theorems, with empirical information about parameters like bounded reasoning, imperfect information, mortal agents, agents with complicated boundaries, etc. AFAIK in those conditions, there could be weird attractors that mean dumb-seeming stuff like government actually makes sense. I’m pretty confident that we could describe a coherent world that’s vastly superior just by changing the (hypothetical) government away from our actual one. What I’m asking about is the forces that have to be contended with to make that work.
That seems like a tall order. Instead of making very general assumptions about agents (which limits the usefulness of mathematical results), it would probably make more sense in this context to talk about empirical analysis. We can ask questions like, do societies that use democratic governments to solve certain types of coordination problems X, generally do better across some metric Y? Economists have been studying problems like this for centuries.
Sure. The field of mechanism design tries to build hypothetical economic systems that would work better than the ones we currently have.
> Economists have been studying problems like this for centuries.
Great. So my question is, what if any are the arguments “that market structures usually do a better job at solving coordination problems than government”. E.g. by giving an equilibrium analysis of a spherical-cow version of the most sweatshop-inducing realistic assumptions that shows that the market nevertheless doesn’t produce sweatshops.