Optimized at all costs

John Maloney over on the Prediction Markets Google group picked up on the Rosetta Stone following quote from Doc Searls in Jay Deragon's blog:Think of markets as three overlapping circles: Transaction, Conversation and Relationship. Our financial system is Transaction run amok. Metastasized. Optimized at all costs. Impoverished in the Conversation department, and dismissive of Relationship entirely. We’ve been systematically eliminating Relationship for decades, excluding, devaluing and controlling human interaction wherever possible, to maximize efficiency and mechanization.The quote is good and the blog interesting, the general devaluation of relationship in favour of transaction and the blind support of markets as the solution to all problems represent considerable problems which deserve more attention. However some of the reactions on the list serve were even more interesting and elicited some fine writing from my old friend David Hawthorne. In fact the whole debate (for those of us who are connoisseurs of debate) is a delight, with language being used to great effect. I think David wins, but then I am biased. The first reaction came from Byrne Hobart who took up the cudgels (a cudgel is defined as a blunt instrument lacking any finesse or subtlety and Byrne uses cudgels as well as rapiers) for markets over two posts, one before and the other after he had read the blog in question. I have replicated the entire thread below but this quote gives you a sense of his position:It's nonsensical to lament the predominance of 'transactions' in the market when they're a more efficient means of the ends which 'relationships' and 'conversations' pursued. If you want relationships and conversations, you can talk to your friends; if you want to profitably aggregate the world's information to maximize efficient behavior, markets are the way to go.Now this type of attitude is fairly typical of the information, transaction centric view of the world that has done so much harm to organisations over the last few decades. Ethics, values, ethnicity and any concept of difference, let alone Rosetta Stone Software context is destroyed or decried. Markets are a tool, but they should not be elevated to the status of a religious object. To reduce all things to markets and information based transactions is to limit the intelligence and capability of humans and permits tyranny. For the record, I am not going over the top here.Byrne's two blogs (of which the above quote is a part) are reproduced below. David entered the fray with a wonderful post, well written and fluent statement, Byrne did a line by line rebuttal and David closed the thread.Byrne response to quotation The blog page isn't loading for me, but the quote is still noteworthy. The problem here is that the information generated by 'transaction' is more useful than the information generated by 'conversation', and that the whole point of complex markets is to get around 'relationship' through more efficient shortcuts. There's nothing stopping this guy from befriending his broker and having lunch with his broker twice a week and making one trade a year -- the market can serve that need just fine, so complaining that it serves more rational needs too is just obnoxious. To illustrate the problem with the blogger's logic, ask yourself: if there's a coal mine collapse in China, will market participants get the right information to adjust their thinking if a) a series of parties in interconnected Relationships discuss the tragedy in Conversations and talk about how the shortage of coal may affect certain industries, or if b) the first trader to hear about it buys coal, edging the price up some fraction of a percentage point so other producers sell a little more and some coal users on the margin switch to other fuels? It's nonsensical to lament the predominance of 'transactions' in the market when they're a more efficient means of the ends which 'relationships' and 'conversations' pursued. If you want relationships and conversations, you can talk to your friends; if you Rosetta Stone Hindi want to profitably aggregate the world's information to maximize efficient behavior, markets are the way to go.