I agree with your attacks on the validity of the underlying mathematical assumptions, and while I've used such arguments myself before, in this thread I am not. Instead, I am pointing out that the welfare theorems aren't very deep when it comes to comparing economic allocation methods, and cannot support, even under ideal mathematical conditions, the claims about the superiority of markets vs non-markets.
The only thing a market can do is improve or "polish" an allocation in some sense. This is at best a local optimum in general, not a global one. To obtain a global optimum, it is therefore necessary to study non-market mechanisms. -- $E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
I guess I'm less charitable when it comes to permitting blithe assumptions that asymptotic solutions are interesting. Once burned twice careful, I guess. (a project of mine involved a relaxation time scale to the asymptotic solution that turned out to be around 19 orders of magnitude greater than the experimental time scale - a fact that failed to become apparent until we'd already spent two weeks and a bit on it...).
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
