A brief argument against price signals

NOTE HXA7241 2016-07-17T09:15Z

Cooperative systems must be ambivalent, therefore they must be multi-dimensional. Prices are only unidimensional, therefore price-systems alone must be inadequate.

Cooperative systems must be consequentially ambivalent. That is, they must produce both loss and gain. They cannot be purely gain, because then everyone could easily, and always would, choose cooperation. And hence the topic would become trivial: there would be no problems, and nothing interesting to say. So there is a kind of necessity by premise: there could be others, but the only cooperative systems we will ever be concerned with are the ambivalent ones.

This means cooperative systems must be multi-dimensional. They must have more than one aspect, more than one way to appraise them – since if there were only one, there could be no ambivalence.

And that means markets must have a fundamental deficiency: because they have in money and prices only a unidimensional mechanism of evaluation. How markets embody or facilitate a cooperative system must be supported by some extra factor – it cannot be by price signalling alone.