clv101 wrote:fifthcolumn wrote:clv101 wrote:
I don't see how your "people in charge" comment relates to my comment.
It totally relates.
Keepz's comment is in a nutshell that he thinks the people who work in the industry know better and have things under control.
The subtext of your comment is that you know better than them.
I see this all the time on peak oil sites. I read a post on the oildrum the other day where a poster said "EROEI is junk science". I agree.
Okay, you misunderstood my comment. I was not saying I knew better, of course I don't that's a daft thing to say. I'm saying Keepz's position is illogical, and that sometimes important things do go wrong.
I don't mean to say that people in the market are incapable of getting things wrong. I am saying that people who have a very strong motivation to get it right and therefore spend their professional lives analysing all the available information and applying the benefit of their experience (and some extremely sophisticated and expensive software) to making decisions based on that analysis, are more likely to get things right than are we on this forum, who for the most part are no more than interested spectators and don't have access to all the relevant information.
Even so, of course examples can be given of where individuals within the market have got things wrong. That's a problem for the individual concerned but not for consumers, since his competitors will be delighted to take the opportunity to fill the gap.
Examples can also be given of where a market as a whole has got things wrong. But there are many, many more examples of where Government intervention gets things wrong. Governments are less well informed than are market participants about the state of supply and demand, and their judgement is inevitably distorted by political factors and by tension between different policy objectives.
Neither markets nor regulators are perfect, but markets have a far better track record of efficiently matching supply with demand