Psychopats have unreasonably high efficiency in convincing people they should lead them tho

Taken alone that sentence applies equally well to any system of government.

Ultimately the more centralized the power the less efficient the system is. Markets are great because they push decision making down to the fringes, closer to where the ground truth is. With highly centralized systems there is a bottleneck both in getting information to the decision makers, but also in overwhelming those decision makers with too much detail and losing fidelity.

The flipside is that markets are only efficient at distributing things that can have a price on them. They're mostly blind to externalities (pollution!) and to problems that can't be solved by distributing the goods most efficiently.

This is why both pure command (Communist) and pure market (Capitalist) solutions fail. You need to decide which system is best for each problem and use the one that works. Consumer goods are absolutely best handled by markets. Healthcare is far more efficient in a command system, because the demand curve is a total mess so markets can't price it efficiently. Utilities are another example where markets are typically worse.

> Consumer goods are absolutely best handled by markets.

But what about the previous paragraph where you said

> markets are... mostly blind to externalities (pollution!)

What about the externalities from consumer goods? (And everything else we value via markets, which is nearly everything else)

> Ultimately the more centralized the power the less efficient the system is. Markets are great because they push decision making down to the fringes, closer to where the ground truth is. With highly centralized systems there is a bottleneck both in getting information to the decision makers, but also in overwhelming those decision makers with too much detail and losing fidelity.

Wouldn't this point to CEOs not being super effective?

I think it's a careful balance. You need the ability to take decisive action, but at the same time the decisive action might just kill the company. I think the solution is supposed to be that you have multiple companies and when one dies off due to stupid missteps another is there to take its place. Unfortunately it appears that companies keep consolidating and gobbling each other up, which I don't think is healthy for society.

Sometimes the best action for a company to take is the one that doesn't maximize short term profit. That's where a CEO can shine. Markets are like genetic algorithms, they are prone to getting hung up on local maxima.

No disagreement with your post in particular.

Just pointing out that the C-suite is also a kind of centralized power.

Unsure why these kinds of stories always devolve into some kind of ism-vs-ism in the comment section because it almost always missed the point.

CEO pay is held up as a symptom of something. My interpretation of that symptom is that it represents a shift in capital over a period of decades. The interesting discussions are around what changed? how did that happen? is it ok? if not, what should be done?

Me? I happen to think it's not ok but like most, don't have a coherent set of suggestions about a path forward.

[edited for grammar]

> but only because violent psychopaths were in power.

There were way more problems with socialism than just the fact it breeds dictators.

If you're starving your people in the time of greatest abundance of food in history it might be more fundamentally flawed.

A lot of starvation is due to the kulaks burning the crops so the communists wouldn't seize their land. Also times are even more prosperous now and people are still starving.

Salvador Allende in Chile wasn't a violent psychopath, but also produced suboptimal results during his short period.

Then came a real psycho, but that's another sad story.

One of the biggest weaknesses in highly centralized authoritarian regimes is that it creates enormous incentives for the largest assholes to lie, cheat, steal, and kill to get into power, because one they're in power they will be free of any consequences. This also means they have to be exceptionally regressive towards the population because they know the next huge asshole will be itching to do the same to them. With decentralized power you can have checks and balances to punish people like that.

Was it Salvador Allende or the CIA and the IMF?

I think Polanyi had a point. The creation of the market and the economy as abstract entities to which other parts of life should be subservient - a surprisingly modern idea - is the root of the evil in modern liberalism - itself a concept mostly disconnected from its root.

What I always find surprising is that, as soon as it’s made abstract enough, even humanist and rational people are apparently ready to defend the worst atrocities.

Just set your priorities in the right orders. If you find yourself defending a system which see sick people die in the street in one of the richest country in the world and history, you are probably in the wrong.

Reading Karl Marx made me realize how much of an arrogant idiot he was, and now I think differently about people who take him seriously