2007 Nobel Prize for Economics winner on free markets

[Felz]

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Efficiency is a black hole. You can't ever settle this question objectively because in order to do so you have to be able to quantify all of the participants' subjective personal preferences. Part of the reason this is impossible is that people can only rank their preferences ordinally, and to compare across individuals you would need some sort of cardinal quantification.

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You're misinformed about what pareto efficiency requires. You don't need cardinal quantifications for neoclassical allocative efficiency. We're not entering the world of social welfare functions and redistribution here.