Technology, and the development of technological products, undermine free market mechanisms. One, of many, reasons for this is the problems consumers face in making a choice about purchases. Does this affect the assumption that consumers are able to make informed and rational decisions, which is required by the argument in favour of free markets? Continue reading
Month: February 2007
Pointless EU bureaucracy
I was going to write about why people are irrational, but the sheer stupidity of the EU bureaucracy trumps ordinary irrationality. Continue reading
Making money by giving away
The advocates of ever stronger copyright and patent laws claim that these are the only way to give people an incentive to create new works and inventions. Here are a few examples that show otherwise, mostly of how people make money by giving away. Continue reading
What happend to increasing leisure?
Thirty or forty years ago widely expected that as technological advances made labour more productive, working hours would shorten and the biggest problem, at least in develop countries, would be educating people to enjoy leisure instead of working. This has clearly not happened, so what went wrong? Continue reading
Drug patents: inefficient R & D funding
Patents allow pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs at several times the price they would be able to get in a competitive market. Only a small proportion of the extra money spent by the public goes into research and development (R & D), despite the latter being the supposed benefit of the higher prices. Continue reading
11 reasons free markets are not
- Most markets are oligopolies dominated by a few companies). For a market to be able to ensure sufficient competition individual companies should be not be able to significantly influence market prices. Economics text books acknowledge this.
No competition please!
Yet another example of the public sector being asked to get out of the way so the private sector can do a worse job. The BBC is restricting its downloads using DRM, in order to avoid competing too much with commercial broadcasters. Continue reading