#marketfailure — Public Fediverse posts

Seems to me that #agribusiness is an example of #MarketFailure, where poisoning workers and destroying local #ecosystems is highly profitable.
And it's not as if alternative approaches don't exist.

Revealed: how Europe’s most powerful farming lobby killed EU’s pesticide law
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/16/how-europe-most-powerful-farming-lobby-copa-cogeca-killed-eu-pesticide-law?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Seasonal Compassion Is a Failed Operating Model

By Cliff Potts, CSO & Editor-in-Chief, WPS News

A Predictable Pattern

Every year, institutions across the developed world engage in a predictable, short-lived surge of concern for poverty, homelessness, and economic precarity. The timing is not accidental. It coincides almost entirely with the Christmas season.

During this period, corporations, governments, faith institutions, and media organizations briefly acknowledge the existence of the poor. Resources are allocated, messaging shifts toward empathy and generosity, and suffering is framed as tragic but temporary—implicitly solvable through limited charitable action.

Then the calendar advances. Budgets reset. First-quarter priorities reassert themselves. The systems that produced widespread insecurity resume without modification, now buffered by the reputational credit earned during the holidays.

This is not an aberration. It is the operating model.

Compassion as Reputation Management

Seasonal compassion functions as a reputational offset, not a corrective mechanism. It allows institutions to appear responsive without addressing root causes. In business terms, poverty is treated as a public-relations risk rather than a systemic market failure.

Concern is carefully bounded in time and scope. It is intense enough to be visible, brief enough to be harmless, and structured to avoid disruption to existing incentives and power arrangements.

The Market Cost of Impoverishment

What is rarely acknowledged is that large-scale impoverishment actively shrinks markets.

When individuals and communities fall into relative or abject poverty, they are removed from meaningful participation in market dynamics. They cannot consume, invest, innovate, or contribute at scale. Their exclusion represents not fiscal discipline, but lost demand, lost productivity, and foregone growth.

From a purely economic standpoint, allowing populations to become this disadvantaged is not efficiency—it is value destruction.

Businesses that tolerate or benefit from systems that impoverish large segments of society undermine their own long-term profitability. Markets cannot expand when purchasing power collapses. Innovation stagnates when survival replaces opportunity. Stability erodes when precarity becomes normalized.

Christianity as Symbol, Not Substance

Christianity, when invoked during this season, is typically reduced to symbolism rather than substance. The figure of Jesus is used to justify generosity while his actual teachings—on debt, power, exclusion, and material need—are operationally ignored.

His emphasis was never on sentiment, but on outcomes. He addressed hunger when it existed. He disrupted systems that normalized deprivation. He did not propose seasonal remedies for permanent conditions.

What we practice instead is managed compassion: bounded, time-limited concern designed to preserve comfort, profit, and institutional continuity while producing minimal structural change.

Exporting a Broken Model

This failure is not confined to any one nation. It is exported.

So-called “developing” economies are encouraged to adopt the same economic frameworks—precarity-based labor, extractive growth models, normalized inequality—that have already demonstrated their inability to produce durable human security. The result is not development, but replication: the same failures, scaled globally.

From a governance and business perspective, this approach is indefensible.

The Year-Round Test

Poverty is not an anomaly within an otherwise healthy system. It is a predictable outcome of policy choices, incentive structures, and economic priorities. Treating it as a seasonal concern guarantees its persistence while steadily eroding the very markets businesses depend on.

If Christianity—or any ethical framework—is to have relevance beyond decoration, it must inform year-round decision-making: fiscal policy, labor standards, housing strategy, healthcare access, and development models. Not symbolically. Operationally.

And if we refuse to fix the causes of relative and abject poverty the rest of the year, nothing we do during the Christmas season will ever matter.

For more social commentary, please see https://Occupy25.com

APA References

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2015). In it together: Why less inequality benefits all. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264235120-en

World Bank. (2020). Poverty and shared prosperity 2020: Reversals of fortune. World Bank Publications. https://doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1602-4

International Monetary Fund. (2015). Causes and consequences of income inequality: A global perspective. IMF Staff Discussion Note SDN/15/13.

Stiglitz, J. E. (2012). The price of inequality: How today’s divided society endangers our future. W. W. Norton & Company.

Making tech giants pay for news was a success the first time around. It can be done again
#BigTech #Journalism #Media #NewsIndustry #TechRegulation #DigitalEconomy #Google #Meta #Democracy #PublicInterest #Politics #SocialMedia #MarketFailure #Business
https://the-14.com/making-tech-giants-pay-for-news-was-a-success-the-first-time-around-it-can-be-done-again/

RE: https://mastodon.opencloud.lu/@BrideOfLinux/116353402229615653

Putting narrower and nastier brackets on the future of everybody. Did anybody ask us if that's the future we want?

#MarketFailure

"Such poor performance leads MacCulloch to ask a provocative and essential question: how is it possible that these executives are 'so incompetently useless they can’t make a buck even when they have no competition?'. He notes that it is difficult to find another developed country where multiple virtual monopolies are effectively 'run at a loss' in terms of shareholder value ..."

#BryceEdwards, 2025

https://theintegrityinstitute.substack.com/p/integrity-briefing-are-business-leaders

(1/2)

#monopolies #MarketFailure

📈 Carbon offsets fail to cut global heating due to ‘intractable’ systemic problems, study says

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/06/carbon-offsets-fail-cut-global-heating-intractable-systemic-problems-study

#climatechange #carboncapture #neoliberalism #politics #failure #markets #marketfailure

@susankayequinn

"it's pollution in our lungs & exploitation of people & burning of the planet & degradation of civil society"

Economists refer to these as "externalities"... often not hidden (air pollution in LA is pretty obvious) as much as unaccounted for...

"Externalities often occur when the production or consumption of a product or service's private price equilibrium cannot reflect the true costs or benefits of that product or service for society as a whole.... since resources can be better allocated, externalities are an example of market failure."

👉 #MarketFailure 👈 is the key concept. So called #FreeMarkets are often incomplete, because not all of the #StakeHolders are at the bargaining table.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Even the oft quoted-out-of-context "libertarian" economist #FriedrichHayek allowed that there were some areas of economic activity that could not be addressed by free or open markets... #publichealth and #pollution to name just two.

[Graphic is from an article by Patrick Miner et al 2024.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb6pENeh4oA

#TheStream

#GenerationRent: How youth are battling the #globalhousingcrisis

'This is a story of #marketfailure'
--- #TaraRaghuveer, #TenantUnionFederation

tenantfederation.org

#housing #housingcrisis #costofliving

I’m also calling this #Marketfailure, btw:

Yes, there clearly aren’t a lot of women who need shoes in my size, but considering that there are literally zero shops (!) that just sell something in that size, the only competition would literally be places that custom-make shoes on order, which indicates to me that it should be possible for something like that to easily survive, especially if it ships internationally…

It’s like skirts and dresses with pockets: You could make so much money of this if you just did it and found a way to let people know about you.

"... the usual separation between markets and politics, where markets are probably going to perform better than democracy in deciding how to allocate resources, was not only conceded by the Cambridge Welfare Economists: they anticipated Public Choice arguments by 60 or 70 years. They just had a different solution."

#MichaelMunger, 2024

https://www.econtalk.org/does-market-failure-justify-government-intervention-with-michael-munger/

#podcasts #EconTalk #economics #MarketFailure #PublicChoice

@phocks

Maybe land development should be a state monopoly, or at least an emergency power?

#marketfailure

@burritojustice

See how market forces are so good at solving critical problems? Look at you can use batteries to make $$$$. Oops, that's not the problem.

#NeoliberalFallacy #NeoliberalMyths Purpose built #MarketFailure (oops, no, that last is wrong - the market is functioning as designed)

Just another quick reminder for #Americans that “Medicare Advantage” is *not* #Medicare.

#MedicareAdvantage is private, for-profit #insurance that is owned by #billionaires.

For profit #medicalinsurance makes more money when they deny you care because it reduces their expenses.

They literally make more money when you die earlier since you are cheaper to care for.

Think about it.

#healthcare #oligarchy #marketfailure #uspolitics #politics #uspoli #usa

https://medicareguide.com/medicare-advantage-to-original-medicare-180767

Let's start a thread about the great lies of trickle-down economics. I'll start.

"We cannot tax billionaires at the same effective overall rates as everyone else, because then these "job creators" won't grow the economy."

(Don't trickle-down on my leg and tell me it's raining.)
#trickledown #marketfailure #latestagecapitalism

#Media #MediaPolicy #Journalism #News #PublicService #MarketFailure: "Amid the retreat of local journalism and the resulting emergence of “news deserts,” where communities lack authentic and civically accountable sources of news, it is important to not only seek new revenue streams for news organizations but also to consider how financial resources and institutional structures secure journalistic autonomy and an abiding dedication to public service. Surveying initiatives to bolster local reporting in multiple countries, this study finds that such efforts frequently rest on an unstated optimism that market failures can be corrected and that new, sustainable business models ultimately will solve the journalism crisis. In contrast to these stopgap interventions, initiatives based on public service media principles found in the world's healthiest democracies—such as providing information across all social groups and fostering civic engagement—are better positioned to rebuild local systems in which news media are structured as enduring social institutions with crucial roles to play in democratic processes."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1461670X.2023.2253928

This is an extraordinary analysis of UK privatised water companies accounts.

Essentially, for years they have been achieving profit margins of 15%, and giving all of that away to shareholders: nothing - zero - into reinvestment for the business.

#MarketFailure #ToryCon #water #capitalism

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/suzanne-lugthart-87594222b_if-youre-interested-in-whats-going-on-with-activity-7080085754244157440-fhLv

10/
🎬 Vídeo 8:
Simona Levi @X_net en @europarl_en:
"El navegador democrático ya existe desde 2004: #Firefox. Sin embargo, depende económicamente de su competidor Google. #MarketFailure 😮

Nuestro informe #DigitalizaciónDemocrática propone que Europa rescate Firefox."
https://youtu.be/Zd01zsXyem0

@jquillin
It's also important that we make efforts toward beneficial #consilience when we analyze our #systems.

At one extreme, we see how severe controls like #monopoly & #patents lead to #externalities like #inequality & #RegulatoryCapture (where they manipulate laws intended to counter these).

At the other end, in more #decentralized industries like Fashion, where clothes are too common to issue patents on, we see unchecked #competition often produces a lack of #coordination and #MarketFailure in the form of senseless overproduction going straight to landfills.

Neither are #sustainable. Both forms can be changed when #workers remember they have the majority, and can unite as #consumers to leverage their spending, as well as #collective #SocialMedia presence to affect change.

Apartment construction is happening at the fastest rate in 40 years in the US. But they're all luxury apartments competing for high-income renters. Affordable housing doesn't get built unless you, me, and everyone else tells their representatives that they want the government to make that happen, and the government intervenes
#AffordableHousing #construction #economics #MarketFailure
https://www.marketplace.org/2022/11/18/home-construction-is-weak-but-apartment-construction-is-booming/

Now that I have moved instances, time for a re-introduction! I am a #LawProf at #McGillUniversity where I teach & research #IntellectualProperty #patents #innovation #trade #GlobalHealth using #transdisciplinary methods (qualitative & quantitative). I have a particular passion for how #OpenScience partnerships contribute to innovation, such as in areas of #MarketFailure like #PandemicPrepareness #AMR, #RareDiseases & #PediatricDieseases

Resolving this paradox requires us to completely rethink how we, as a society, pay for the creation of texts. In the digital age it makes no sense to leave this to markets. Markets are designed to distribute scarce resources, not effectively infinite ones likes digital copies of text. Instead, we need institutions that identify talented writers and give them tenure, ideally a variety of them to ensure plurality of authorial voices. So how do we fund these, if not through markets?

#MarketFailure

@craigmaloney Remember, even if you cancel and return, they've retained you as a customer (this goes for any subscription service).

Quit and don't go back.

And yeah, as Cory Doctorow notes, #VoteWithYourWallet is bullshit -- #MarketItHarder is not the solution to #MarketFailure and #monopoly

File complaints with your state's communications regulator, your city / county / state / national reps, your federal comms and competition regulators.