A couple of things struck me while reading this article:
1) Everything is a market. Any time people get together, for any purpose, trading occurs. That means the art of trading -- your time for a few ads, or whatever -- is happening. The users of Pirate Bay may be sticking it to the man or whatnot, but it's just another marketplace -- albeit one with much cheaper entry and transaction costs. (So it's a winner for the participants)
2) The confusion, yet again, between correlation and causation. Yes, there may only be 100 people who start all the torrents, but the 100 people are not the cause of the torrents, they're just the statistical artifact of having a marketplace in which certain behaviors are rewarded more than others. Take away those specific 100, and a new group would form. It's not like those 100 people are somehow directly causing the effect, they're just the people who fell into that role in that community at that time.
Everything is a market. Any time people get together, for any purpose, trading occurs.
The truth of that assertion hinges on us not remembering the billion other counter-examples.
It might comfort free-market capitalists like ourselves to paint humanity with that thick brush, but truth tells differently: people don't always gather with the intention to buy/sell, in fact, sometimes, commercial intent is detrimental to a healthy assembly and is frowned upon.
>> Everything is a market. Any time people get together, for any purpose, trading occurs.
> The truth of that assertion hinges on us not remembering the billion other counter-examples.
It would have been nice if you'd have provided some of those counter-examples.
> people don't always gather with the intention to buy/sell
There's your problem - you think that trading only involves money. It doesn't. It's the exchange of value.
Yes, you hang around with your friends because you get more out of doing that than it costs you to do so.
Yes, someone will try to impose costs on you to affect your choices. You'll try to avoid them.
Sure, everything's a trade of value if you define the term "trade of value" loosely enough. As far as I can tell, that's more of a semantic game than an actual revelation.
At a certain point in that line of reasoning, the "value" becomes nothing but "satisfaction in knowing you did something nice for someone else." It's something people value, but to put it in terms of a market transaction misses the point by a wide margin.
Just that trading occurs anywhere people get together doesn't mean everything is a market. I'd have liked to +10 you. It's so hip these days to see everything in the context of economics, as a market.
In my opinion that's actually hurting our understanding of human behaviour, by trivializing every interaction.
It's a generalization, not a trivialization. Saying all human interactions are markets is like saying everything in computer programming is an object (or everything is a function, or everything is data, or whatever). It's a particular way of looking things that yields insights depending on where, how, and how well it is applied.
It trivializes it only if you draw some grand conclusions from economic theory.
I think many times we get the simple fact that humans are traders mixed up with all this political and economic theory nonsense. To acknowledge that people are always trading is an important observation in itself, and doesn't imply any other conclusions. Draw your own.
If anything, it looks like the study of economics is doing exactly what you say: it's showing that these trades many times are irrational, are not for money, and are driven by as many complex forces as exist in the human psyche.
So you can start with "it's all a market" and end up with the complexities of human existence, or you can start with "It's not all economics" and end up with the complexities of human existence. Same difference. Either way, the problem is taking huge generalizations and beating them with a rhetorical hammer until they fit some personal worldview, not the observation of the phenomenon itself.
a market dont require the intention of buying and selling, just the exchange of something in return for something else.
Exchange of what? Goods and services for other goods and services of comparable value, or cash, or notes of debt?
Is that not the definition of a market?
Here is a human gathering for you: a funeral. What goods & services are changing hands? And please don't say "the family's savings going to the funeral home".
Money is exchanged for the rite of ceremonial burial. Most people don't just stick their mum into the ground - it's just not "proper". Social factors require a ritual market in most societies.
I pity your society. In mine, the community buries its dead for free. You're not even supposed to cook at your own house for weeks, neighbors bring in food.
Do you really think you're saying anything useful by baldly ignoring the context of the original statement in order to make a fuss over "free market capitalists"?
The context is not funerals or family reunions or random events, it's communities of people interacting over time.
1) Everything is a market. Any time people get together, for any purpose, trading occurs. That means the art of trading -- your time for a few ads, or whatever -- is happening. The users of Pirate Bay may be sticking it to the man or whatnot, but it's just another marketplace -- albeit one with much cheaper entry and transaction costs. (So it's a winner for the participants)
2) The confusion, yet again, between correlation and causation. Yes, there may only be 100 people who start all the torrents, but the 100 people are not the cause of the torrents, they're just the statistical artifact of having a marketplace in which certain behaviors are rewarded more than others. Take away those specific 100, and a new group would form. It's not like those 100 people are somehow directly causing the effect, they're just the people who fell into that role in that community at that time.