What the Market Doesn’t Know Can Hurt You, Whoever You Are

Every participant in any system, is dependent upon the quality of information behind the major forces at play, just as any player in any system is beholden to the quality or jeopardy posed by the system’s prevailing methods. Free flow of information is the best hope of achieving the optimum level of functionality for the broadest array of stakeholders.

We need to ensure that the highest quality, most profoundly-informed, most widely-available information possible is accessible throughout any given market, because what the market doesn’t know can hurt you. And that goes just as much for workers, consumers and the underprivileged as it does for corporations, corporate bosses, government programs and the privileged. Everyone has a stake in the possibility of optimal outcomes.

The market, as an organizational model, can be an optimal resource-allocating mechanism, not because of ideology or mystical superiority, but because when it works, those who require a given solution will either call out for it, implement it, or pay for someone to do so… and opportunity creates possibility. This is the simultaneously adversarial-collaborative relationship between demand, supply, consumer interest and financing.

The market is a self-reinforcing optimization model. But when the market lacks information or those who require a given solution don’t know they do, the allocation of resources is clumsier, less accurate, than in the optimal case, and that imprecision has real socio-economic ramifications.

For instance, not knowing one’s rights can lead to their being ignored or violated, because one’s actions and reactions evince a weaker informational position. Or, not seeing the thought and production gap that will need the next big infusion of private capital can lead to poor performance for businesses, as inadequate planning leads to poor positioning with regard to opportunities or even to replacement technologies.

How, for instance, will the right businesses with the vision appropriate to the task capitalize on the possibility of providing an endless resource of ambient energy, self-powering vehicles, a green world where without ‘giving up the ghost’, or any sap or carbon, plantlife doing what it does can make things move? First, they will have to be able to see the possibilities, then they will have to see the lacunae where those possible innovations fit into the functioning of markets, then they will have to see how to piece together a business model based on that vision.

If people lack useful information about their interests or about the risks or resources in their environment, then they are unlikely to demand the precise improvements to prevailing conditions, improvements the market could provide and which would best serve them. And without that “summoning” of improvements, specific, the market may also fail to come to that necessary information about possibility.

And there the market finds its most worrying weakness. Worrying in part because it gives fodder to critics who argue that hierarchical dictates and dominance-based reasoning are what will protect against the perilous aspects of relying on human ingenuity and voluntary cooperation, based on shared interest.

What we now see as a grave obstacle to realizing the dream of an open global village is that the logic of dominance reigns in the minds of those planning to benefit from “open markets”, while it is the logic of dispersed and multifaceted vision and shared interest that will allow global markets to democratize and provide. People everywhere should make a conscious effort, as citizens of the world, to delink the logic of dominance from market dynamics and elevate the logic of free-flowing unfettered information to a goal in and of itself.