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Comment by sunir | Hacker News Reader

Just because democracy and capitalism were invented, didn’t change what humans knew worked beforehand.

The innovation is that you aren’t born into a given regime and you can switch regimes.

This made the system capable of any number of regimes from the freelancer to coops to communes to partnerships to private corporations to public corporations to crown corporations to charities to not-for-profit trade associations to your kids lemonade stand to nonincorporated affiliated entities to manage the local block yard sale to Uber to open source projects to family trusts to whatever and so on.

However to manage a market function to extract petroleum cost effectively, it seems a corporation at the scale of BP, as a hierarchical corporation is the system so far shown to be most efficient? I presume anyway.

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> … to be the most efficient

I assume you mean financial efficient. I personally suspect that getting resources out of the ground and to consumers would be a different usage of the word efficient.

Financial efficiency isn’t the same as being efficient in resource utilisation.

The capitalistic systems produces much waste in terms of resources and little or no waste in terms of capital.

Financially efficient is resource plus labor efficiency. Money represents resources and labor. Financially efficient cant be anything other than labor and resource efficient.

iff P == NP.

Otherwise the market is just a heuristic for obtaining one type of workable solution and then refining it into a local optimum.

Business thought heartily embraces this when talking about how to make a profit - profit itself is an indicator of non-optimality, and nowhere near a small epsilon for most businesses. But then when criticizing instances where the heuristic has failed and created solutions/structures that look quite non-optimal, so many people want to brush this aside this reality and invoke the efficient market fallacy.

No I'm saying that if you have found the cheapest way to do something with money (all inclusive, not local) then you have found the fewest resources plus labor as well.

Would that not imply eating the cheapest food available would also be the healthiest?

Buying the cheapest car would be the most resource efficient and most reliable car?

The implication being that cheap is best, which it most certainly isn’t. In your case cheap = fewest resources used.

But cheap could also be achieved by tax breaks, financial trickery (shifting debt around shell companies), producing products in cheap labour countries and then shipping it around the world as opposed to producing locally with less resources required for transportation.

Yes, I understood that. It's a common fallacy, but in reality markets just aren't fully efficient like that. Reread my above comment.

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