With each passing day, I look less and less like a lunatic for avoiding facebook (and its ilk) like the plague.

You should try it.

This particular invisible hand has been hamstrung by malignant forces. Notably, the payer in a typical healthcare transaction is not the same as the recipient, splitting the typical buyer role into two.

Because health insurance is now commonly provided by employers because of World War II price controls, and because we have become accustomed to using health insurance to pay for all matter of health care, including routine visits, consumers are often ignorant of health care costs.

Customer A: My insurance will pay? Fine, let's do this. Cha-ching, price rises.

Customer B: My insurance will pay? Fine, let's do this. Cha-ching, price rises.

Customer C: Oh, insurance won't pay? How much? Whoa! How did the price get so high?

It's no surprise then that the invisible hand works in a way that appears flawed when one of its inputs (the buyer's sensitivity to price) is frustrated.

People of my persuasion often make the case that if automobile insurance worked the same as health insurance, and we used insurance to pay for oil changes, the price of oil changes would shoot up wildly. Reason being that you would no longer care what it costs.

Obviously the seller (the doctor in the case at hand) wants the price to be as high as possible. The invisible hand can't keep this in check—it cannot discipline the seller with lost sales—when so many buyers do not act with actual price sensitivity.

Despite most of the points in this post being debatable — there's one bit that caught my eye:

    "Being nice will not help it, and CoffeeScript is not radical enough."

As the guy who started CoffeeScript, I agree. It's an intentionally very conservative approach. But there's more than one good way to skin the JavaScript cat. I think it would be fun to take another run at the same problem — attempt to find a minimal, readable, and easier-to-learn language that fits in the same role as JavaScript — but to do so with a much more radical design. Whereas previously such a thing would have been unusable in practice, having good sourcemap support in most browsers these days makes it viable, perhaps. I've been playing around with it a bit...

Many aspects of US society today are organized under the assumption that if every individual pursues what is in his/her best financial interest, the "invisible hand of the free market" will produce the best possible outcome for everyone.

Yet here we have reputable doctors acting in their self interest, and the result is that they are ordering unnecessary surgeries for financial gain. Meanwhile, patients are essentially unable to protect themselves against this travesty.

Maybe in this case the invisible hand cannot be seen because it is not there?

I developed a patch that added the VAO WebGL extensions earlier this year and it's finally out there! So. Cool. And everyone at mozilla is really helpful if you're thinking about contributing for the first time.

The invisible hand operates under the assumption that there are no information assymetries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand

This is obviously not the case in patient-doctor relationships.

The standard Austrian response for those information assimetries are that an independent third party will arise that will offer an unbiased opinion (usual example is Underwriters Laboratory or UL).

A more government-based approach would say that more regulatory oversight is needed.

However, in practice, I haven't seen this happening, I'm not an economist but I see there are agency problems, regulatory capture problems, etc..

Stiglitz said:

"the reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there. Whenever there are "externalities"—where the actions of an individual have impacts on others for which they do not pay, or for which they are not compensated—markets will not work well...

recent research has shown that these externalities are pervasive, whenever there is imperfect information or imperfect risk markets—that is always"

It's a sign of strength in a company when the CEO can talk candidly about problems like this. Every company has problems, most worse than this, but they rarely talk about them except in the blandest, most evasive way.

Conspicuous candor.

Seems like the post tiptoes around the issue of having called out Apple for having awful bugs when in fact it was user error. Interesting post, but a little more forthrightness would have helped.

Also the previous post hasn't been amended.