It's clear it doesn't work perfectly - depression rates in capitalist countries are very high, salaries are still a problem, even when GDP improves. The Communist revolution took off all over the world, but later everyone learned that communism isn't better.
All change takes time and energy.
I think we're still missing a great economic thinker who can try to solve it. We've put a lot of our energy into things like electronics, computer, medicine in the past century, because that's where all the big problems were.
It's likely someone will revise capitalism soon enough, especially given all the computing power we have to make models, and even the data that can be pulled from things like MMOs.
I think it's going to be impossible to improve on price being determined atomically by buyers and sellers agreeing on an individual basis what something is worth. That's the heart of what makes capitalism so effective. What this individual is willing to pay for that individual item is almost impossible to predict down to more than a pretty broad range of pricing. So many variables factor into what one person will pay for an item. And that determination changes even for that person depending on timing. I might be much more likely to make an impulse buy on payday than I am on the day before payday. The decisions around how much something is worth is too unpredictable to be centralized or predicted.
"Let the market decide" is a misdirection from what makes free markets great: individuals deciding, for themselves, whether to make a purchase after a seller has suggested (or demanded) a price.
No central planning algorithm can take the place of that, which is why attempts at centralizing an economy are always undermined by black markets.
> All change takes time and energy.
I think we're still missing a great economic thinker who can try to solve it.
We’ve known that the economy is an intractable problem for a lot longer than I’ve been alive. Capitalism approximates an efficient solution. There’s a large economics and computer science literature on this if you’re interested, or for a fictional treatment you could read Red Plenty, Francis Spufford, which is an historical novel covering the theory in the historical background it was developed in[1].
> The socialist calculation debate, sometimes known as the economic calculation debate, was a discourse on the subject of how a socialist economy would perform economic calculation given the absence of the law of value, money, financial prices for capital goods and private ownership of the means of production. More specifically, the debate was centered on the application of economic planning for the allocation of the means of production as a substitute for capital markets and whether or not such an arrangement would be superior to capitalism in terms of efficiency and productivity.
Spufford’s treatment of genetics is so shockingly mathematically ignorant in that book (whether Raissa Berg had anything to do with his depiction of her crusade or not) that that book was on thin ice with me even before Cosma Shalizi’s review
All change takes time and energy.
I think we're still missing a great economic thinker who can try to solve it. We've put a lot of our energy into things like electronics, computer, medicine in the past century, because that's where all the big problems were.
It's likely someone will revise capitalism soon enough, especially given all the computing power we have to make models, and even the data that can be pulled from things like MMOs.