Super interesting! I wonder how it applies to moral issues—I can see maybe through things like humanewashing and greenwashing where a demand for ethics gets compressed into a meaningless label. This helps to articulate some of my uneasiness around free-market ideologies à la Friedman. Thanks for writing!
Interesting question indeed.. I have a public goods market I designed several years ago (which could apply to any measurable moral public goods), I do wonder how this would apply to that
You reference legibility, so I'll take Seeing Like a State as read. (For others ICYMI, Scott has a memorable critique of the way that states and markets both crowd out complexity, diversity and embodied knowledge - 'metis' - in favour of what can be made legible and therefore taxable or priceable.) In your next essays, I'd love some reflections on the ways in which this might also apply to an attempt to make meaning more legible to markets. If some of our current social problems are amplified by models that 'see like markets' as they enclose our social worlds, how would you avoid the potential pitfalls in trying to solve these problems by enabling markets to see further, and enclose more? Put differently, where does the metis of meaning go in the meaning-aligned markets you're imagining into being?
this paper is relevant for your next essay. another angle to think about it is how batesian mimicry depends on the original species for the mimicry to function.
Super interesting! I wonder how it applies to moral issues—I can see maybe through things like humanewashing and greenwashing where a demand for ethics gets compressed into a meaningless label. This helps to articulate some of my uneasiness around free-market ideologies à la Friedman. Thanks for writing!
Interesting question indeed.. I have a public goods market I designed several years ago (which could apply to any measurable moral public goods), I do wonder how this would apply to that
You reference legibility, so I'll take Seeing Like a State as read. (For others ICYMI, Scott has a memorable critique of the way that states and markets both crowd out complexity, diversity and embodied knowledge - 'metis' - in favour of what can be made legible and therefore taxable or priceable.) In your next essays, I'd love some reflections on the ways in which this might also apply to an attempt to make meaning more legible to markets. If some of our current social problems are amplified by models that 'see like markets' as they enclose our social worlds, how would you avoid the potential pitfalls in trying to solve these problems by enabling markets to see further, and enclose more? Put differently, where does the metis of meaning go in the meaning-aligned markets you're imagining into being?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08913811.2024.2354648
https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/Ackerlof.pdf
this paper is relevant for your next essay. another angle to think about it is how batesian mimicry depends on the original species for the mimicry to function.
Already hinted at, it’s a classic! Don’t know about bates and mimicry
lol. I'm not in any academic circles, so I never know what's classic and what's a niche discovery!
I'm thinking about a similar problem in education (how schooling uses proxies, and how those proxies end up being confused for the real thing).
"But when it comes to some of the things people want most — love, friendship, belonging, meaning — the trend seems to run in the opposite direction."
Because these wants are actually the desire to be wanted.
It's hard for markets to promise a contract to a customer when the results depend on the customer themselves