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.

[tolbiny]

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This whole thread is pretty pointless unless someone can supply an explanation of how the prize winner differentiates between private and public goods, because therein would seem to lie the rub.

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I find myself agreeing with you a lot these days.

[Moseley]

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What Maskin is stating is that the Bush "free market orthodoxy" is not a way to change the policy related to the public goods associated with energy.

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Not only does Bush not have a "free market orthodoxy"....he doesn't even know how to pronounce it.

He admits he only got a B- in Economics 101 in college.

[mosdef]

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Do you guys really think that a completely free market would result in some sort of utopia?


[/ QUOTE ] Are you suggesting that socialism has led a utopia?

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No, I am suggesting this (from the second link in the OP):

Prof. Maskin goes on to speak of the needs of ensuring that public goods are provided for properly, taking into account the interests of all citizens, and on the role of his field in finding ways to do so most fairly and efficiently.

This should be considered sane, valuable, important work, especially if we care about building sustainable human societies more than any ideology, yes?

However, the mere acknowledgment of this complex field is an affront to “free market” ideologues who prefer to believe that markets are, by their very existence, efficient — in much the same way that food riots are, by their very existence, orderly.

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I don't understand how that infers that free market supporters think markets lead to utopia. It's a baseless assertion that without government intervention there would be so many people starving to death that there would be food riots. Count me in the skeptical group.

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Unfortunately, this remains something of a state religion in the US, so while hundreds of newspapers have reported on Maskin’s winning of a Nobel, few seem to have bothered to pick up the Reuters story of what the Nobel Prize winner actually says. (In fact, as I write this, the wire story is already a day old, and while I might have missed something, I can’t find it in a single American newspaper.)

The efficiency of the great free market, absolutely proven once again.

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As for this nonsense, I assure you that the vast majority of people don't care at all about what this guy has to say, Nobel prize or not. "You want proof that the market doesn't work - the market doesn't reserve people's time to listen to me! And I'm important and extremely interesting! QED, market failure!"