Sublime

We can use this thought experiment to test the likely outcomes of different rules and structures to come up with an aggregate of “most fair.”

The Alleged Intangibles

If you run a two-sided marketplace, you’ll find contra Hayek that not all knowledge is local. For example, Sidecar lost to Uber because drivers set prices themselves, as opposed to setting them centrally. Hayekians would agree that Sidecar’s approach was optimal: drivers have local knowledge and central planning can’t work. But Uber’s central plann

What people do with their own money (their ‘revealed preferences’) is generally a better guide to what they really want than their own reported wants and needs.fn3 Had

This is a new kind of caveat emptor, where consumers are going to have to search more to make sure that the offered price is fair. Consumers are going to have to engage in a kind of number crunching of their own, creating and comparing datasets of (quality-adjusted) competitive prices.

In practice, however, we don’t usually assign the same value to every one of our dollars. The way we view each dollar depends on which category we first linked this dollar to—or, in other words, how we account for it.