<CPOV> Wars Of Fortune

[Jon Awbrey]

Pursuing the analogy, the market analogue of an arms merchant --
the "Third Man" who hedges his bets profiting off the naivete
of the duelistic thinkers behind both barrels -- would likely
be the hedge fund manager or even the outright confidence man.
For every Bernie Madoff who eventually gets caught a thousand
more will make off with the marginal loot to nice retirements
on their island catbird seats in the Canaries or the Caribbean.

Jon Awbrey

nathaniel tkacz wrote:
> hi all - some fast and loose thoughts...
> 
> i don't think a marketplace and a battlefield are necessarily so far apart!
> players in market are involved in battles of sorts and also sometimes
> negotiate! there are terms in basic economics that gesture toward these
> different scenarios, like ideal markets and oligopolies.
> 
> let's not also forget the wales himself describes the process of article
> creation as likened to a market.  the wiki ideology of article creation
> resonates with a market theory in at least two ways:
> 
> - both claim that ideas come together and the best ones rise to the top and
> become successful,
> - both claim that there is no overarching, absolute body who determines the
> criteria of success, (once again, these are produced 'by the market'),
> 
> it is this kind of thinking that connects wales to hayek and was also
> discussed by florian cramer. florian made the claim that npov is hayek's
> market theory translated into encyclopaedic policy.
> 
> i do think that wikipedia functions in ways that often resonate with a
> "real" market, because i don't believe that real markets function like the
> ones described and taught in economic theory (that is something marx did a
> good job of critiquing). instead, like real markets, there is a gap between
> how markets are explained and how they operate. to think alongside a famous
> passage in Capital, what we need to do is leave the domain of policy (of
> rights, freedom and bentham) and look closely and critically at how things
> actually get made (that is, we need to enter the factory).
> 
> thinking wikipedia through the frame of markets and political economy more
> generally might be very productive, especially if we look both at the theory
> of markets and the practice of markets.
> 
> best
> 
> Nate Tkacz
> 
> Research Fellow,
> RMIT University
> 
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/__nate__
> Homepage: www.nathanieltkacz.net
> Current project: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/about-2/

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