I've told this story before, but I once talked to an economist who, when she testified before Congress, used the phrase "market failure" and was immediately interrupted by an apoplectic Congressman bellowing that "markets don't fail!" https://twitter.com/BillCorbett/status/1354446258820296707

To an economist, asserting that markets don't fail is not unlike telling a cardiologist that hearts don't fail.

We like markets! We know they're very good at resource allocation, but for a market to be good at optimization there are a number of conditions that have to be met.

Labor markets are structurally incapable of optimization without significant intervention; for that, we need UBI (so that people aren't forced to accept starvation wages), robust worker protections, and a healthy organized labor ecosystem.

Markets are inherently incapable of efficiently allocating healthcare; there is no possible way to structure incentives when you're having to put a price on not fucking dying. The best estimates I've seen show that not only is the allocation inefficient, but it falls under the…

production possibilities frontier, meaning that not only are we not spreading our healthcare around in a way that maximizes utility and minimizes cost, we're not even producing as much as we could. (I know this is very squishy sounding, but we do have ways of quantifying things.)