I think the question in this case is whether feedback mechanisms outside of proper free market forces should be labeled “effective,” since many of us consider the accuracy of free market feedback to be light-years beyond that of rough individual human judgement.
(apologies if this is sliding into an inappropriate political discussion)
Free market feedback is generally strong, but often subject to perverse incentives. There are matters I would be more comfortable leaving in the hands of free market than the government, and other matters where I would be much less comfortable seeing them handled by the free market. I think that a “general case” where the balance clearly lies in favor of one or the other is probably mythical.
I’ve read and seen some really thought-provoking material on ways in which the free market could supposedly do a lot of traditional government roles. There are also sites like judge.me which are testing some of it out, including private contract enforcement and law. So I wouldn’t automatically say that government is better at certain things.
What kind of perverse incentives are you concerned with? There is certainly some incentive to do things like using force and deception to get money or resources, but the market also includes a mechanism for punishing this and disincentivizing that type of behavior, and I’d say the same incentive exists in governments.
What kind of perverse incentives are you concerned with?
There are a huge number of potential perverse incentives idiosyncratic to the specific cases; again, I don’t think this is an issue where there’s a practical “general case” address.
If you want to ask me to, say, name a few specific cases, I could do that, but it should be with the understanding that they shouldn’t be taken as representative examples whereby, if we solve them, we can generalize those methods to all remaining perverse incentive scenarios. I can definitely think of examples off the top of my head that require neither the use of force of deception.
The government is also subject to some perverse incentives, some of which do not apply to markets, but in some cases it fares better because, while businesses are required to keep their own interests at the bottom line, and in some situations those interests can diverge significantly from those of their consumer base, the intended purpose of the government is to serve the populace.
This book has a reasonable concentration of examples of businesses operating under perverse incentives, but also some examples of free market enterprises offering services with higher costs and lower efficiency than government bodies offering the same services, and might be worthwhile food for thought.
Thanks for the link. Of course, I felt like it would be easiest to discuss some quick examples from your point of view, as I don’t want to mischaracterize you. But if you’d prefer not to that’s fine. As I said, I don’t want to get too far into political arguments anyway.
Judge.me was shutdown in July 2013, but evidently Net-Arb is another service carrying on the Judge.me torch and focusing primarily on internet arbitration.
I think the question in this case is whether feedback mechanisms outside of proper free market forces should be labeled “effective,” since many of us consider the accuracy of free market feedback to be light-years beyond that of rough individual human judgement.
(apologies if this is sliding into an inappropriate political discussion)
Free market feedback is generally strong, but often subject to perverse incentives. There are matters I would be more comfortable leaving in the hands of free market than the government, and other matters where I would be much less comfortable seeing them handled by the free market. I think that a “general case” where the balance clearly lies in favor of one or the other is probably mythical.
I’ve read and seen some really thought-provoking material on ways in which the free market could supposedly do a lot of traditional government roles. There are also sites like judge.me which are testing some of it out, including private contract enforcement and law. So I wouldn’t automatically say that government is better at certain things.
What kind of perverse incentives are you concerned with? There is certainly some incentive to do things like using force and deception to get money or resources, but the market also includes a mechanism for punishing this and disincentivizing that type of behavior, and I’d say the same incentive exists in governments.
There are a huge number of potential perverse incentives idiosyncratic to the specific cases; again, I don’t think this is an issue where there’s a practical “general case” address.
If you want to ask me to, say, name a few specific cases, I could do that, but it should be with the understanding that they shouldn’t be taken as representative examples whereby, if we solve them, we can generalize those methods to all remaining perverse incentive scenarios. I can definitely think of examples off the top of my head that require neither the use of force of deception.
The government is also subject to some perverse incentives, some of which do not apply to markets, but in some cases it fares better because, while businesses are required to keep their own interests at the bottom line, and in some situations those interests can diverge significantly from those of their consumer base, the intended purpose of the government is to serve the populace.
This book has a reasonable concentration of examples of businesses operating under perverse incentives, but also some examples of free market enterprises offering services with higher costs and lower efficiency than government bodies offering the same services, and might be worthwhile food for thought.
Thanks for the link. Of course, I felt like it would be easiest to discuss some quick examples from your point of view, as I don’t want to mischaracterize you. But if you’d prefer not to that’s fine. As I said, I don’t want to get too far into political arguments anyway.
Judge.me was shutdown in July 2013, but evidently Net-Arb is another service carrying on the Judge.me torch and focusing primarily on internet arbitration.
Thanks for the updated information.