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1/ I enjoyed a brief debate with @glenweyl at radicalxchange. One topic was the famous Stigler/Becker "De Gustibus" paper. The authors show that, rather than describing people as varying in preference, they can be described as uniform in preference, varying instead...
2/ ...in trainings, skills, or other forms of human capital which equip them to enjoy different things. A related idea is that we all occupy different positions in society, and that these positions equip us with resources (like friend groups) that make different...
3/ ...consumption choices work out. Glen's suggestion was that on this view, markets set up arrangement to satisfy something deeper than preferences—reconciling a multitude of positionings of human capabilities and resources in a direction that ultimately relates to...
4/ ...a universal preference. I've always loved this view, but it is incomplete. Consider one type of human capital that might be unevenly or positionally distributed: different people may have had different communicable realizations about what it is for them to live...
5/ ...well—what kinds of relationships are meaningful, what kinds of work, and so on. Imagine furthermore that two neighbor's communicable realizations can often be *reconciled*, through deliberation, to form an even more powerful idea about how their lives and...
6/ ...systems might be organized well. If this kind of "human capital" is an important part of what Stigler/Beckler would call the household production function, we can see that markets might miss certain opportunities. In particular, the optimization process of the...
7/ ...market may fail to identify opportunities for (a) transmission of these communicable realizations, (b) reconciliation of them, and (c) larger-scale social changes due to these reconciliations.
8/ When I say that markets act on preferences rather than values, this is one way to understand what I mean. They work on superficial outputs rather than what people are really going for. Thankfully, what we are really going for is articulable (unlike "human capital"...
9/ ...more generally)—and this is why we can do better than markets.
