Yeah Communism

After I watched the TED conference clip that Bolos showed us yesterday, I could not remember where I had heard the name Barry Schwartz before.  I got home and discovered that I had read his book, The Cost of Living: Market Freedom and How it Erodes the Best Things in Life. 

His overall argument that we saw a piece of was that people have bought into the idea that free market principles work

He argues that markets do not work efficiently if people are willing to do anything to each other.  When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, he didn't expect the economy to become as faceless as it is today.  He said, in book he wrote  a few years earlier The Theory of Moral Sentiment, that what makes the market work is that there is a set of empathy.  For instance, the butcher of the town can charge whatever he wants, competition will regulate that, but he won't sell poisoned meat. 

People have seen Adam Smith's argument and said, "whatever we do for ourselves helps the economy." The problem is that this belief has changed the way that humans think about the way they should act.  We have become less empathetic and the market will not work effectively in this manner. He wrote this book before the collapse, so it seems he was right.

It seems scary that one man's theory has changed so much about human empathy, but if you read his book it actually makes sense.  I've always believed that capitalism was flawed, but I don't know if this is the solution.