The 'marvellous market' is the main cause of our fatal problems

The core point is that the market system cannot but enrich the rich. It does other things, including produce "trickle down" benefits. But you cannot be surprised that global inequality rates have accelerated to the point where it is estimated that half the world's wealth is now owned by 1% of the world's people.

Fault 6. The market is horrendously inefficient. Conventional economists claim that the market makes the most "efficient" allocations of resources and investment. This is absurdly wrong. It is only true if we define "efficient" in terms of the monetary return on investment. If on the other hand we are concerned with using resources and capital to meet needs most efficiently, or to do what is morally right, or to develop what is best for the environment, then market forces are not only appallingly inefficient, they will almost always result in precisely the wrong outcome!

Fault 7. The market damages society. When buying and selling within a market situation is allowed to become the main mechanism determining what happens in a society, then desirable social attitudes, bonds, relations and social cohesion are diminished or driven out. This is the most disturbing consequence of the Neo-liberal triumph. It makes altruism and cooperation and concern about the pubic good irrelevant at best, or liabilities holding the individual back. It generates a more selfish, mean, unequal, predatory and callous society, focused on individual advancement and beating others in competition. There is no place in the market for the things that make a society admirable, such as generosity, prioritizing the welfare of the other or those in most need, doing what's good for society, giving and nurturing. In fact there is strong incentive to disadvantage the other, and indeed to deceive and cheat and be predatory.

The Neoliberal triumph has made the market so central that this is now referred to as a "marketing society". But a society is made up of far more things, and far more important things than mere monetary exchanges intended to maximize benefit to an individual. In fact there is a contradiction between what maximizes the wealth of self-interested individual and what makes a society possible, let alone admirable. A society is made up by the things that are collective, the things that are by definition not to do with individual self interest thing such as traditions, customs, a moral code, sense of decency, civility, standards, myths, aspirations, beliefs, rationality, aesthetics and a political system. In view of these many often subtle factors, to allow individual self-interest to become the overwhelming determinant of what happens is a serious mistake. As Polanyi stressed long ago, it literally destroys and drives out the things that constitute society.

Again the market mechanism does some things effectively and there might be an important place for it in a tolerable society, but too few recognize that it is responsible for most of the world's problems. But, you are probably saying, TINA. I think there is a very satisfactory alternative (and it is not an economy run by a centralized state and it is an economy mostly made up of private firms). For an outline of the "Simpler Way" vision see TSW: The Simpler Way.