[lbo-talk] Markets and info

Tayssir John Gabbour tjg at pentaside.org
Thu May 11 17:04:06 PDT 2006


andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> Yikes. I'm not going there. Fucking disaster. Some
> years ago Robin Hahnel published and answered, without
> asking me or informing me he was doing so, some of my
> criticisms of parecon, with his responses.

Yeah, I can definitely sympathize with having somewhat less than pleasant online conversations with one of the Parecon people ;) ... but of course, that often happens online.

But that said, Parecon ideas appear reasonable to me, or at least a useful direction...


> Note that it
> is markets that give us the idea of an opportunity
> costs and a reason to find out what they are.

Well, the problem is, I don't find opportunity costs to be unique to any particular economic system/institution, or even economics itself. It's more fundamental than that, a concept which pops up in many classes of rational decisionmaking.

AI people use the same concepts when modelling all sorts of rational decisionmakers; when deciding what you want on your dinner plate, in driving a car, etc.

Jim Devine wrote:
> BTW, I don't know of any mainstream economists who are ignorant of
> opportunity costs. Everyone knows about it, including
> non-mainstreamers like myself.

These economists just can't correctly answer questions about it, apparently. (Even though they probably teach it to their students.)

http://epp.gsu.edu/pferraro/docs/ferrarotaylorbep.pdf http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/business/01scene.html?ex=1283227200&en=178537355ee405f1&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

tfast wrote:
> Hayek is indeed the place to start. He makes the argument that
> prices are an information signalling system. A very accessible
> paper is here:
> a.. Hayek, F. A. 1945. "The Use of Knowledge in Society".
> [HTML format] American Economic Review. Vol. 35, No. 4. (Sept):
> 519-530. [PDF format version]

Thanks for the cite!

Tayssir



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