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.
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.
Well, one could ask why negative effects are more likely to be attributed to markets, whereas positive effects to be attributed to other factors or simply taken for granted.
Is it really the case? For start I’d like to have an objective and not entirely arbitrary way of measuring how much likely various effects are attributed to markets and other factors. Speculations framed as “why people dislike X” by someone who happens to like X are always suspect of tribal politics, especially when the suggested answer points to some failure of rationality. Of course, such speculations aren’t necessarily useless because of that, but one should at least be certain that one is trying to explain a real phenomenon.
This part rubs me the wrong way:
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.
Well, one could ask why negative effects are more likely to be attributed to markets, whereas positive effects to be attributed to other factors or simply taken for granted.
Because people are better at signalling. Whenever something good happens, there is a person ready to take credit for that, deserved or not.
Markets are good at signalling about individual products or companies (advertising), but not about the concept of “market” per se.
Is it really the case? For start I’d like to have an objective and not entirely arbitrary way of measuring how much likely various effects are attributed to markets and other factors. Speculations framed as “why people dislike X” by someone who happens to like X are always suspect of tribal politics, especially when the suggested answer points to some failure of rationality. Of course, such speculations aren’t necessarily useless because of that, but one should at least be certain that one is trying to explain a real phenomenon.
It seems that many people like to approach markets by using additional data from their personal networks.