> Look, if an ADULT spends $500 of their hard earned money to buy Fortnitebux or Smurfberries or whatever, I don't know what business it is of yours. If an adult wants to spend cash on beer or DLC or opera tickets or loot boxes, it's their right.
I was ready to write an angry 10,000 word response on the importance of private property and the free market system. But reading this paragraph de-escalated the situation enough for me to realize this article was only a general overview of the industry they work in.
The basis of free markets is that on balance people with radically different preferences will make better choices more aligned with their preferences and local knowledge than other systems do.
Markets perform better than other allocation systems for many things. It's an observed principle rather than something that was directed from above.
Some economic models assume people are rational because on aggregate it works for those models.
Mostly market systems have substantially outperformed centrally controlled systems.
If you take a descriptive (vs. prescriptive) view of the free market, you have to include all observations.
Yes, we've observed that under free market, "people with radically different preferences will make better choices more aligned with their preferences and local knowledge", at least on many occasions. We've also observed countless of occasions when they'll make a worse choice. Sometimes idiotically worse choice. We've observed the cases where those choices, aggregated, cause wide-spread suffering.
So many people were asking a question - why does free market work perfectly in some cases, but fails so badly in others? That's where the "rationality" and "full knowledge" things come from. Economists have figured out that these are necessary conditions for the free market model to work the best. When you make people behave irrationally, or refuse to give them full knowledge, the free market model results in suboptimal outcomes.
Free market isn't a silver bullet. It's a process that gives particular outputs for particular inputs, and we've been mapping the relationship between its domain and codomain for a while now. We know that the more rational participants and the more symmetrical information come in, the more ethically positive transactions come out. This can be seen in both theoretical models and in practice.
Now when the game industry is "researching increasingly sophisticated ways to undercut [players'] rationality", what that means is that they're weaponizing the free market to fuck fellow human beings over.
I was ready to write an angry 10,000 word response on the importance of private property and the free market system. But reading this paragraph de-escalated the situation enough for me to realize this article was only a general overview of the industry they work in.