Comment on: "Something’s Happening Here" by Thomas Friedman

See
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/12/opinion/theres-something-happening-here.html?_r=1&hp
for original article by Thomas Friedman

I vote for Paul Gilding's \"The Great Disruption\" as closer to \"the truth\". Economics and economists have led us to believe that free market capitalism, with its supposed self-correction and optimum resource allocation mechanisms, is the cure-all. However, in order to come up with this \"theory\" of economics and their wonderful economic models, they have had to \"externalize\" and/or abstract almost everything from the real world. They (economists) postulate perfect and complete knowledge when players in the free-market economy, from individuals choosing a new car, to corporations deciding on a new product, make their decisions. That is, of course, complete bunk. For example, marketing/Madison Avenue spends billions to mis-inform us about products and services, using sophisticated psychological techniques, combined with outright lies, to ensure that we do NOT have complete information, and that we do NOT make rational choices. And how complete was the information of financial institutions in defining the real estate based junk products, and how rational were their decision in betting everything on these products, which no one really understood?

Free market capitalism has shown its lethal flaws (ignoring, for example, the environmental impacts, and the social/human impacts, because it cannot be \"priced\"). I do not pretend to know how to fix this, but something will have to radically modify, or even replace, free market capitalism if the world is to survive.