&gt; <i>The thing about markets is that (...) tell us (...) what we collectively find valuable.</i><p>No, they don&#x27;t - that&#x27;s the very point of this article. What society finds valuable and what is economically valuable are two different, separate concepts (and we should really have two different words for them - the term &quot;value&quot; is <i>way</i> overloaded).<p>First of all, the market is not an information display - it&#x27;s an actor. It doesn&#x27;t <i>report</i> on how much something is &quot;worth&quot;, nor does it &quot;settle&quot; on true prices - it provides a lot of intertia and <i>maintains</i> whatever status it ends up with. Rarely can a society coordinate strongly enough to have its collective will affect the market on purpose (if it could, soccer players and movie stars wouldn&#x27;t be making <i>that</i> much money).<p>Secondly, the market - that emergent system of aggregated individual economic decisions and incentives - suffers from the typical problems of greedy optimizations. It gets stuck in stupid local minimums. It gets stuck in idiotic feedback loops. Look at e.g. advertising industry - a negative feedback loop where each actor works to cancel out the effort put by other actors. It&#x27;s a stupid loop that can suck up infinite amount of resources - not money, but tangible resources. Time, manpower, fuel, energy. Think of how much of e.g. printing industry exists only to support advertising by manufacturing trash - leaflets, magazines, billboards, etc.<p>Nature - or the Creator, if you&#x27;re a believer - gave us brains so that we can notice and correct local minimas and stupid feedback loops of incentive gradients. Market economy isn&#x27;t a god.