I think your concerns are absolutely spot on, and they match mine almost exactly - I've spent practically my whole working life modeling complex systems, and pathologies are the rule, not the exception, so it strikes me as unbelievably naive to just assume that there's something magical about free markets when in reality they are made up of millions of different entities with different objectives, costs, and constraints. Even when you're simulating a system that's provably stable, when simulation errors and noise creep in, you're batting about 50/50 as to whether your particular simulation method will go off the rails or not (as anyone that's ever tried to simulate a damped harmonic oscillator starting from Newton's laws and the obvious method of approximating a derivative knows quite well). In simulation we take stability arguments and proofs very seriously, the presumption being that if you can't prove that a system is stable, you can't assume anything about it (the exception being physical processes, where stability of the underlying can usually be taken as a given because of anthropic principal arguments and we're merely tasked with finding the proof, as well as a simulation scheme that doesn't screw up - that's a lot more difficult than it sounds, especially for complex systems like fully relativistic gravity).

These concerns are of the utmost priority in most fields that involve complex systems, especially processes that we have a hand in influencing, except for economics and politics, where everyone's pet arguments are balls to the wall, and tend to either imply that we should be living with full blown communism or complete unregulated anarchy (okay, I suppose contract law and the military are typically carved out as the exceptions). It's one of the few areas I've ever seen where none of the popular arguments seem to have any sort of balance - and I'm not talking "balance" as in fairness, I'm talking about "balance" as in trivial idea that if both extremes suck (which they usually do, whatever particular idea or disagreement you're arguing over), and something in between is better, then there exists some optimum between the extremes. Step one involves admitting that either extreme has a problem, but instead everyone seems to keep arguing that the whole problem is just that we're not actually at that extreme, 100%.