Certain kinds of markets are good at doing certain things, just as certain kinds of government structures are good at doing certain things. Broadly speaking, markets appear to be good at providing material goods that individually take up a small fraction of the median income, have a respectably high turnover within the lifetime of a single individual and are reasonably easy to transport from one place to another.
OTOH, markets are exceedingly poor at making infrastructure that actually works (education, electricity, trains, payment clearing systems, pensions). And markets are completely unable to allocate non-local costs (systemic risk, cascading failures) and long-term costs (environmental destruction, resource depletion, failures due to insufficient maintenance). Or at least markets do not seem to be able to allocate those costs in a way that does not threaten to destroy the social structures that enable markets to exist.
Goods with moderately high turnover but which are largely immobile and take up a large fraction of the median income (real estate, mainly) have decidedly mixed empirical results for markets compared to central planning.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
That there is a private real estate market beside the government pool does not detract from the fact that the government housing is centrally planned according to criteria that have to do with social policy, city planning and similar criteria.
Examples of centrally-planned, non-market housing that immediately come to mind in otherwise market-based societies are state-run prisons, some mental health institutions, military barracks, and some refugee camps. It's centrally planned if there are no choices and exchanges involved on the part of the receiving agents.
The council owns over 5,000 properties that are rented to tenants. We provide services to tenants including housing repairs and providing a local neighbourhood manager. In this section of the website you can apply to join the housing register or to move between council houses, pay your rent online, have your say in tenant participation, plus other services. We are introducing a new choice-based lettings system and also administer the council tenants' right to buy scheme. Also see the housing advice section for information on sheltered housing, emergency accommodation and other ways we support the housing needs of the district.
The council owns over 5,000 properties that are rented to tenants. We provide services to tenants including housing repairs and providing a local neighbourhood manager.
In this section of the website you can apply to join the housing register or to move between council houses, pay your rent online, have your say in tenant participation, plus other services.
We are introducing a new choice-based lettings system and also administer the council tenants' right to buy scheme.
Also see the housing advice section for information on sheltered housing, emergency accommodation and other ways we support the housing needs of the district.
In fact, if you are going by that definition of "market," any reasonably industrialised country with even a half-evolved monetary system qualifies as a "market economy." I fail to see how that is helpful to a political or economic analysis that deals with a tolerably technologically sophisticated society.
