Anyway, it is a pretty slim amount of information that you have and it presumes very little volatility in the market if the information is going to be valuable to someone actually starting up an enterprise. It also assumes all sorts of regulatory instruments will be in your favor (which makes sense since all of these are supposed to be geared only towards making this process work better) As for information about consumers, unless you have a bunch of opinion polls to go along with it, even that information is pretty speculative and, for the most part, skewed by all sorts of monopoly controls. It can tell you that people are or are not buying something but it can't tell you why. That's what the business press is for (I always love to hear the explanation at the end of the day as to why the stock markets did what they did--fantastic stuff.)
But, as you point out, much of that information is becoming proprietary in one way or another precisely because a market model is being applied to that as well. I'm sure there are a variety of theoretical apoligetics for this, complete with caveats and exceptions which are only temporary inconveniences to the application of this ideal of market society--such as the mechanism the market provides for regulating the commodity of labor (i.e. if there are too many laborers, their population will go down, i.e. they and their children will die. If you want the quote on that from Adam Smith, I'll find it.)
One way or another, human messiness manages to spoil the beautiful potential of the informational mechanism of the market. If only humans understood this higher purpose, they wouldn't complain so much about things like food or gas being too expensive or labor being too cheap. They would just marvel at how perfectly they were being told about their impending demise. (note it is usually the people on the bottom who mess this up. the people on the top who do far more in this direction are justified because they are just better at the competition. Robert Hielbroner says this is all the result of these theories cresting in the 19th century at about the same moment as Darwin's _origin of the species_ but that's a whole other argument--one that Galibraith, in one of his final editorials for Mother Jones, contested.)
I would be interested to know what you mean by Parecon working better. I have a notion of what you mean by this, but since there are a variety of notions as to what that means, I'd be interested in your take.
> Perhaps someone more sophisticated at economics can explain something to
> me. I've never understood what people mean when they talk about
> "information" being something free markets give us. Maybe I'm just a
> technerd jaded by info, but it seems to me that free markets aren't
> impressive at delivering info. (For example, externalities aren't
> accounted for in a given transaction.)
>
>
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