Discussion at Crooked Timber on ‘what are markets’

Well, sort of on markets.
There is an interesting conversation going on at Crooked Timber our public debate in the econosphere and political rhetoric . Henry posts on the use of arguments over the term neo-liberalism and finishes with:

For what it’s worth, I think that the open information agenda, and the political inequality agenda have a lot more in common than most people think (I have been planning for some time to do more writing on this over the next year). I think it would be a lot more useful to frame the argument as one between different ways of restructuring markets so as to tackle problems of inequality at their source than as one between neo-liberalism and its critics

Lifted from comments,  Bruce Wilder offers this observation:

To a large extent, we are all intellectual victims of economists, dead and otherwise, who really do not know what they are talking about. The main problem with the standard analysis of the “market economy”, as well as many variants, is that we do not live in a “market economy”. Except for financial markets and a few related commodity markets, markets are rare beasts in the modern economy. The actual economy is dominated by formal, hierarchical, administrative organization and transactions are governed by incomplete contracts, explicit and implied. “Markets” are, at best, metaphors.

The elaborate theory of market price gives us an abstract ideal of allocative efficiency, in the absence of any firm or household behaving strategically (aka perfect competition). In real life, allocative efficiency is far less important than achieving technical efficiency, and, of course, everyone behaves strategically.
In a world of genuine uncertainty and limitations to knowledge, incentives in the distribution of income are tied directly to the distribution of risk. Economic rents are pervasive, but potentially beneficial, in that they provide a means of stable structure, around which investments can be made and production processes managed to achieve technical efficiency.
In the imaginary world of complete information of Econ 101, where markets are the dominant form of economic organizations, and allocative efficiency is the focus of attention, firms are able to maximize their profits, because they know what “maximum” means. They are unconstrained by anything.
In the actual, uncertain world, with limited information and knowledge, only constrained maximization is possible. All firms, instead of being profit-maximizers (not possible in a world of uncertainty), are rent-seekers, responding to instituted constraints: the institutional rules of the game, so to speak. Economic rents are what they have to lose in this game, and protecting those rents, orients their behavior within the institutional constraints. Those constraints are in the nature of a public good, and if that public good is well-provided, the behavior is socially beneficial and technically efficient.
It is within this context, that risk and innovation (aka, changing institutional structure) can pay off.
So, yes, licensing barbers can make perfect sense. It creates a small economic rent, and if that rent is tied effectively to barbers being scrupulous about safe and healthy technical practice, that’s a economic benefit. The gain is in technical efficiency, not allocative efficiency.