The laissez-faire proposition is that if we just resist the temptation to futz with the computer (to "distort the market"), it will select the best person for each position: workers, consumers, and, of course, "capital allocators" who decide where the money goes and thus what gets made.

The vast, distributed market computer is said to be superior to any kind of "central planning" because it can integrate new facts quickly and adjust production to suit varying needs.

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Let rents rise too high and the computer will trigger the subroutine that brings "self-interested" ("greedy") people into the market to build more housing and get a share of those sky-high rents, "coming back into equilibrium." But allow a bureaucracy to gum up the computer with a bunch of rules about how that housing should be built and the "lure new homebuilders" program will crash.

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Likewise, if the government steps in to cap the price of rents, the "price signal" will be silenced and that "new homebuilders" program won't even be triggered.

There's some logic to this. There are plenty of good things that market actors do that are motivated by self-interest rather than altruism.

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When Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed their Pagerank algorithm and revolutionized internet search, they weren't just solving a cool computer science problem - they were hoping to get rich.

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But here's the thing: if you let Larry and Sergey tap the capital markets - if they can put on a convincing show for the "capital allocators" - then the market will happily supply them with the billions they need to buy and neutralize their competitors, to create barriers to entry for superior search engines, and become the "central planners" that market theory so deplores.

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If your business can't get any market oxygen, if no audience ever discovers your creative endeavors, does it matter if the central planner who decided you don't deserve a chance is elected or nominated by "the market"?

Here's how self-proclaimed market enthusiasts answer that question: all Larry and Sergey are doing here is another form of "capital allocation."

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They're allocated *attention*, deciding what can and can't be seen, in just the same way that a investor decides what will and won't be funded. If an investor doesn't fund promising projects, then some other investor will come along, fund them, get rich, and poach the funds that were once given to less-successful rivals.

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In the same way, if Google allocates attention badly, then someone will start a better search engine that's better at allocating attention, and we will switch to that new search engine, and Google will fail.

Again, this sounds reasonable, but a little scrutiny reveals it to be circular reasoning. Google has dominated search for a quarter of a century now. It has a 90% market share.

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According to the theory of self-correcting markets, this means that Google is *very good* at allocating our attention. What's more, if it *feels* like Google actually sucks at this - like Google's search-results are garbage - that doesn't mean Google it bad at search. It doesn't mean that Google is sacrificing quality to improve its bottom line (say, by scaling back on anti-spam spending, or by increasing the load of ads on a search results page).

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It just means that doing better than Google is *impossible*. You can tell it's impossible, because it hasn't happened.

QED.

Google wasn't the first search engine, and it would be weird if it were the last. The internet and the world have changed a lot and the special skills, organizational structures and leadership that Google assembled to address the internet of the 2000s and the 2010s is unlikely to be the absolute perfect mix for the 2020s.

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And history teaches us that the kinds of people who can assemble thee skills, structures and leaders to succeed in one era are unlikely to be able to change over to the ideal mix for the next era.

Interpreting the persistent fact of Google's 90% market-share despite its plummeting quality as evidence of Google's excellence requires an incredible act of mental gymnastics.

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Rather than accepting the proposition that Google *both* dominates *and* sucks because it is *excellent*, we should at least consider the possibility that Google dominates while sucking because it *cheats*. And hey, wouldn't you know it, *three* federal courts have found Google to be a monopolist in *three* different ways in just a year.

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Now, the market trufans will tell you that these judges who called Google a cheater are just futzers who can't keep their fingers off the beautiful, flawless market computer. By dragging Google into court, forcing its executives to answer impertinent questions, and publishing their emails, the court system is "distorting the market." Google is the best, because it is the biggest, and once it stops being the best, it will be toppled.

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This makes perfect sense to people who buy the underlying logic of market-as-computer. For the rest of us, it strains credulity.

Now, think for a minute of the people who got rich off of Google. You have the founders - like Sergey Brin, who arrived in America as a penniless refugee and is now one of the richest people in the history of the human species.

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He got his fortune by building something that billions of us used trillions of times (maybe even *quadrillions* of times) - the greatest search engine the world had ever seen.

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Brin isn't the only person who got rich off Google, of course. There are plenty of Googlers who performed different kinds of labor - coding, sure, but also accountancy, HR, graphic design, even catering in the company's famous cafeterias - who became "post-economic" (a euphemism for "so rich they don't ever need to think about money ever again") thanks to their role in Google's success.

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There's a pretty good argument to be made that these people "earned" their money, in the sense that they did a job and that job generated some money and they took it home. We can argue about whether the share of the profits that went to different people was fair, or whether the people whose spending generated that profit got a good deal, or whether the product itself was good or ethical. But what is inarguable is that this was money that people got for *doing something*.

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Then there's Google's investors. They made a *lot* of money, especially the early investors. Again, we can argue about whether investors *should* be rewarded for speculation, but there's no question that the investors in Google took a risk and got something back. They could have lost it all. In some meaningful sense, they made a good choice and were rewarded for it.

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But now let's think about the *next* generation. The odds that these billionaires, centimillionaires and decimillionaires will spawn the *next* generation of 1%ers, 0.1%ers, and 0.0001%ers are *very* high. Right now, in America, the biggest predictor of being rich is having rich parents. Every billionaire on the Forbes under-30 list inherited their wealth:

ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/forb…

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The wealthy have created a system of dynastic wealth that puts the aristocratic method of primogenitor in the shade. Every scion of every one-percenter can have their own fortune and start their own dynasty, without lifting a finger. Their sole job is to sign the paperwork put before them by "wealth managers":

pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dyn…

Yes, it's true that some of the very richest people on Earth got their money by investing, rather than inheriting it.

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