Whenever someone says that all policy problems can be solved by markets, they appeal to something they call "basic economic principles."
If one goes to the open course page for the intermediate micro course offered at MIT, one finds the following topics on the syllabus:
Six out of fifteen of topics (8-9, 11-14) are about ways the market can produce suboptimal outcomes. These topics are not esoteric any more (they are showing up in intermediate courses), and they have rigorous economic theory behind them. It was time we stopped using the phrase "basic economics" to refer to idealized market conditions that often do not exist.If one goes to the open course page for the intermediate micro course offered at MIT, one finds the following topics on the syllabus:
| Consumer Theory | |
| 2 | Choice, Preferences, Utility |
| 3 | Demand, Revealed Preferences, Comparative Statics |
| 4 | Consumer Surplus, Aggregation |
| 5 | Variations to the Basic Choice Model (Time, Uncertainty) |
| Producer Theory | |
| 6 | Technology, Profit Maximization, Cost Minimization |
| 7 | Supply, Aggregation |
| Markets | |
| 8 | Monopoly |
| 9 | Oligopoly and Game Theory |
| 10 | Walrasian Equilibrium |
| Market Failures | |
| 11 | Externalities |
| 12 | Public Goods |
| 13 | Small Number of Agents, Nash Bargaining |
| Asymmetric Information | |
| 14 | Adverse Selection, Moral Hazard, Principal-Agent Model |
| 15 | Auction Design |
| 16 | Voting and Other Applications |
This is a nicely structured course, you know. And the kicker--other than your point--is that each if these topics is a complex, nuanced, and large field of study in and of themselves. You can spend a lifetime studying just voting or just externalities.
ReplyDeleteI have to deal with the "basic market outcomes" argument all the time with environmental justice stuff. Oh, minorities are poor, they can't live in nice places, simple markets. Yada. I just want to shake people and ask if they've never heard of land market externalities or information asymmetries, which are rife--everywhere, all the time.
here, here
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