Market Forces
From Change
Are market forces enough?
More specifically is simple supply and demand enough to drive progress in society?
In short, I don't feel that market forces are enough to explicitly drive progress. Thus, while I acknowledge that our market driven economy and society has definitely progressed, I feel that this is more as an inefficient implicit side effect, than due to explicit engagement.
Beyond the personal impressions, there is the very real issue of how to overcome systemic problems. These are problems in a system that are resilient to change. More explicitly, when attempting to introduce change, the system tends to either self "correct" or merely cause the symptoms to be exhibited in another aspect of the system.
These are truly hard problems to solve. They generally require combination of structural change and critical mass.
However, it would seem that while these problems can be resolved implicitly, it does take a long time, and the resolution or progress is not guaranteed. That is, the implicit processes that might address such problems are rather like the emergence of complexity due to emergence. Clearly we have a number of examples from nature of where this occures, but at the same time it can be frustratingly slow to watch.
Bringing this back to a discussion of market forces, consider the concrete example of an electric car. The belief in market forces states that my desire to buy an electric car should lead the market to produce such a car. However, though this probably will happen, we need to acknowledge that the practicality of either owning or producing an electric car depend on supporting infrastructure. However, clearly there is no demand for the infrastructure since there are almost no electric cars on the roads as yet. Hence, the system is stuck with pure supply and demand resulting in a negative feedback. Note, however, that this in no way implies that the electric car would not be successful if we can shift both of these reciprocal parts of the system at the same time. Market force pundits would probably argue that some other aspect of the market will interact with this part of the system to ensure that the negative feedback is overcome. I'm simply not comfortable that we can be sure of that.
Rather, I feel that explicit progress in society relies on collaboration. That is, self directed group wide co-ordination that, on an aggregate level, is acting in the same direction and probably towards a common goal. However, collaboration does not simply occur because we all get a warm fuzzy feeling to work together for the greater good. There are still some basic pragmatic issues that need to be taken into account. Essentially, while collaboration relies on the contributions of individuals, we do still need frameworks and processes that support and facilitate said collaboration.
In summary, while I am happy to live with a free and open market I feel that we need to explicitly support collaboration though the development of frameworks and processes that take the psychology of individuals into account while simultaneously engaging providing an explicit systems view of the big picture. To me, this combination forms part of the foundation for creative progress in society.
