The market does excel at giving people what they want. That's not a feature. It's a bug.
"If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." - Henry Ford (possibly apocryphal, but probably true)
Markets pander. They do not elevate. I do not want what I want. I want things that are so much better than what I want that I have not imagined them yet.
Think about when you see a movie or read a book. Isn't it boring if someone's already told you the plot? You want to be surprised, and you're usually disappointed if things turned out the way you expected them to.
Of course, markets do have virtues. They excel at solving multi-dimensional resource allocation problems in the short term, and they excel at taking new things and delivering them to customers. Big science bureaucracies and such are good at discovering and inventing, but they suck at shipping. The "pirates of Silicon Valley" invented little, but they shipped.
Markets excel at giving people what they want in the long term, too. For example, the Henry Ford you quoted built a car company that became one of the most successful in the world. There is nothing about markets that prevent entrepreneurs from selling innovative products and it happens all the time. Entrepreneurs creating new things and then selling them is so common that on Hacker News, people like Steve Blank and Eric Ries have made names for themselves encouraging entrepreneurs to listen to the market even just a little bit.
A market that decides what I want is the dream of every communist dictator.
Sometimes invention is the mother of necessity. That doesn't mean it's a bug. It means there are innovative and resourceful people who realize what people want before they ask for it. Capitalism gives those people a better chance to succeed than any other economic system.
It also has room for the guy trying to treat baldness.
P.S. Is there evidence that Henry Ford actually said that? Because he definitely didn't invent the automobile; Karl Benz did.
"If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." - Henry Ford (possibly apocryphal, but probably true)
Markets pander. They do not elevate. I do not want what I want. I want things that are so much better than what I want that I have not imagined them yet.
Think about when you see a movie or read a book. Isn't it boring if someone's already told you the plot? You want to be surprised, and you're usually disappointed if things turned out the way you expected them to.
Of course, markets do have virtues. They excel at solving multi-dimensional resource allocation problems in the short term, and they excel at taking new things and delivering them to customers. Big science bureaucracies and such are good at discovering and inventing, but they suck at shipping. The "pirates of Silicon Valley" invented little, but they shipped.