Free markets aren’t ‘great’ in some absolute sense, they’re just more or less efficient? They’re the best way we know of of making sure that bad ideas fail and good ones thrive. But when you’re managing a business, I don’t think your chief concern is that the ideas less beneficial to society as a whole should fail, even if they’re the ideas your livelihood relies on? Of course, market-like mechanisms could have their place inside a company—say, if you have two R&D teams coming up with competing products to see which one the market likes more. But even that would generally be a terrible idea for an individual actor inside the market: more often than not, it splits the revenue between two product lines, neither of which manages to make enough money to turn a profit. In fact, I can hardly see how it would be possible to have one single business be organised as a market: even though your goal is to increase efficiency, you would need many departments doing the same job, and an even greater number of ‘consumer’ (company executives) hiring whichever one of those competing department offers them the best deal for a given task… Again, the whole point of the idea that markets are good is that they’re more efficient than the individual agents inside it.
Free markets aren’t ‘great’ in some absolute sense, they’re just more or less efficient? They’re the best way we know of of making sure that bad ideas fail and good ones thrive. But when you’re managing a business, I don’t think your chief concern is that the ideas less beneficial to society as a whole should fail, even if they’re the ideas your livelihood relies on? Of course, market-like mechanisms could have their place inside a company—say, if you have two R&D teams coming up with competing products to see which one the market likes more. But even that would generally be a terrible idea for an individual actor inside the market: more often than not, it splits the revenue between two product lines, neither of which manages to make enough money to turn a profit. In fact, I can hardly see how it would be possible to have one single business be organised as a market: even though your goal is to increase efficiency, you would need many departments doing the same job, and an even greater number of ‘consumer’ (company executives) hiring whichever one of those competing department offers them the best deal for a given task… Again, the whole point of the idea that markets are good is that they’re more efficient than the individual agents inside it.