Re:Where Have All the Schematics Gone?
by wpietri on Sunday February 02, 2020 @11:21PM
(#22221406)
The notion that the market is always optimal is one of the central articles of faith in free-market fundamentalism. It's essentially tautological, a commerce-filtered spin on the just world fallacy.
What you ignore is that there are a bunch of information and experience asymmetries here, some of them intentionally created by vendors. There are also big problems with short-term biases and principal-agent problems. These lead to demonstrably sub-optimal global outcomes.
As an example, look at the recent wave of Softbank-funded idiocy. There's no way WeWork was an optimal deployment of capital. You could have lit $10 billion on fire and done better. But it worked out very well for Adam Neumann, who not only got lots of short-term adulation and wealth, but somehow ended up becoming a billionaire because they paid him to go away. And this is from the supposedly hyper-rational experts in the world of finance. If they can't get it right, there's little reason to think that random purchasers and Tektronic's middle managers will.
What you ignore is that there are a bunch of information and experience asymmetries here, some of them intentionally created by vendors. There are also big problems with short-term biases and principal-agent problems. These lead to demonstrably sub-optimal global outcomes.
As an example, look at the recent wave of Softbank-funded idiocy. There's no way WeWork was an optimal deployment of capital. You could have lit $10 billion on fire and done better. But it worked out very well for Adam Neumann, who not only got lots of short-term adulation and wealth, but somehow ended up becoming a billionaire because they paid him to go away. And this is from the supposedly hyper-rational experts in the world of finance. If they can't get it right, there's little reason to think that random purchasers and Tektronic's middle managers will.