The museum to markets – The Museum of Failures

As regular readers will note around here we tend to like markets. On the grounds that they generally - except where they don't - work. But it's important to understand what it is that markets generally work at and that's not success, not at all. Markets work well because they work well at failure.

Which is why we're rather tickled by this new Museum of Failure.

LEARNING IS THE ONLY WAY TO TURN FAILURE INTO SUCCESS

That's their tagline and we'd quibble a bit with it even though we agree with the general idea. Rather, as we'd put it, you can only succeed if you work out what's failing. Some of the ideas, like that Coke Blak, could have, might have, succeeded. They didn't. Others it's a bit more mysterious why they didn't succeed:

Bic For Her pens are also on display. The supposedly female-friendly pink and purple pens launched to widespread derision and mockery in 2012. "I mean, you know that women can't use regular pens. You need special pens for their delicate hands," West said. "And they're double the price of regular pens because they're specially for women." 

Quite why that didn't work is unknown, pink razors do cost more than blue as we're so often told they do. The important part of it though is this:

West told The Local.: 'You can fail at any point during the process. It's better to have a lot of cheap mistakes early in the process, than to do so on a large scale. Then it costs billions.'

That's why market systems work better than planned ones. What it is possible to do, what people want to have done, is an ever moving feast. The technology with which we can do things is always changing and so are personal tastes. We want thus some method of sorting through what can be done and what people want to have done. And the finest way yet discovered of doing this is for every lunatic to try. We, the rest of us, will then sort through what is available and decide upon which of these possible things that can be done add utility to our lives.

Imagine wandering into GOSPLAN one day to explain that we need an overlay to the telecoms network so that people can swap cat pictures with each other. Mr. Zuckerberg would have been laughed out of the room and yet 2 billion people later that experiment he cooked up in a dorm room seems to add utility to some number of lives.

And thus the glory of that Museum of Failure, it's a museum to why markets work. Precisely and exactly because so many innovations get absolutely nowhere - that's how we find out which ones we want.

from Adam Smith Institute http://ift.tt/2oXTcos
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