What it really means is, "Markets aren't as efficient as if God used his omnipotence to organize everything. But they are as efficient as actually possible. It's not like the Government can calculate P=NP stuff better."
I don't buy that they are as efficient as actually possible. I wish there were some means of trying out different resource allocation strategies, but I think people who are doing so well in the current setup will do whatever it takes to maintain status quo.
> I don't buy that they are as efficient as actually possible.
It doesn't much matter if they aren't without something that is more efficient.
Consider the following line of "reasoning".
(1) "X is a problem and we must do something."
(2) "Y is something."
(3) "Therefore we must do Y."
The "fact" that markets are not as efficient as possible does not imply that we should use something else instead. We should only use something that is actually better.
Sorry, I obviously wasn't clear enough. What I meant was: Capitalism is a system to manage resources. Since it seems to end up with an extremely short term focus when it isn't tightly controlled, I wonder if there aren't possible alternative systems that would do a better job. We can't know if we never try.
> Capitalism is a system to manage resources. Since it seems to end up with an extremely short term focus when it isn't tightly controlled
"seems"? Yes, we do have short-term focus in certain situations. However, I know 90 year-old farmers who plant orchards that won't be productive for 10 years.
And, you're assuming that "tightly controlled" produces benefits. Yes, there are often controls, but that's a long way from showing benefits from said controls. (Surely you're not going to argue that any system of tight controls produces benefits.)
And, as someone else pointed out, no one is stopping you from working on a long term basis. If you do it right, you'll get rich. If you do it wrong, probably not.
I'd like to see you get rich. However, I'm not willing to risk my money on your ideas because I've got my own.
I said "seems" because I didn't want to make the statement absolute and spend a bunch of time debating the point. Regardless of what is theoretically possible, what appears to happen in practice is a (terminal imo) short term focus.
The most important contributors to a company are said to be the share holders, but investment via stock is a very temporal affair. Just get in, try to enforce policy that will quickly generate increase stock value, then dump it before it crashes and move to the next.
And no, I don't think any random control is a help, just that no control what-so-ever is just as bad as all the wrong controls.
>I said "seems" because I didn't want to make the statement absolute and spend a bunch of time debating the point.
Since your argument depends on whether the statement is true and relevant, trying to avoid discussing it is "interesting".
You're assuming that the current stock system is the only way one can do things without regulation. You're wrong. You can set up a company in other ways, with almost any restriction on buying and selling by its owners that you'd like. All you have to do is get them to go along. If you're making them rich, they will. (For example, there are at least two classes of Google stock. The favored few own shares that are weighted differently when it comes to corporate decisions. One can also implement restrictions on buying and selling. IIRC, UPS has them.)
>And no, I don't think any random control is a help, just that no control what-so-ever is just as bad as all the wrong controls.
(1) The current situation is not "no controls".
(2) There's no reason to believe that "no controls" is anywhere near as bad as the wrong controls.
You can try them out in simulation. The hard part is making people actually care about the outcome if you use real people as the actors, but game writers already do fairly well at this.
