Misaligned Markets podcast teaser

Welcome to the Misaligned Markets Podcast. I'm your host, Mike. I'm also the writer of the Misaligned Markets blog.

Fundamentally, Misaligned Markets is a project about a marriage that has gone deeply wrong, a marriage between capitalism and markets. Now, when I say capitalism, I'm talking about this idea of enclosure, the historical process of gating or privatizing resources for the rent of an owner.

And so capitalism is a system that functions by labeling things in the economy so that its owners can gain income. And when I talk about markets, I'm talking about a system of exchange based on means or the ability to participate and access resources.

So this project is devoted to analyzing the deep tension, the dysfunctional marriage between markets and capitalism.

I treat them as two subsystems of the broader system we call capitalism.

As part of this project, I'll be sharing my own original analysis as I have through the blog, but I will also be interviewing academics, researchers, activists, basically anybody with firsthand knowledge of the system and how it functions.

So why now? What makes this timely?

Well, in the year of our Lord 2026, the sins of the world just keep growing bigger and bigger. We're seeing gargantuan collective action problems like climate change, war, democratic collapse that we can't coordinate on. And these aren't accidents. They emerge from market failure and externalities, and increasingly the ways in which the system atomizes us and prevents us from coordinating on collective action problems.

But aside from that, you probably feel something off in your own life too, right? You see it in things like dynamic pricing, where a producer can choose to charge you more for staring at an item too long. Or maybe you've experienced a rights repair issue where a product you own can't be legally repaired by you. In the case of prosthetics, this is literally a matter of life and death.

Or for those of us in the US, consider that our labor can be classified by an employer in a way in which we can't receive health care, right? Again, another life or death matter. These are not distinct issues. They're all connected via the dysfunctional marriage of markets and capitalism.

Now, I'm a pragmatist. I try and find the best parts of everything. I actually think markets have value, but the way that we talk about markets today has been tainted by neoliberals like F.A. Hayek and Milton Freeman in the historical sense of what neoliberal meant.

So the neoliberals of old would have us conflate markets and capitalism so that whenever we talk about markets, we always were pointing to the enclosed systems that we've created today.

And so we're essentially children of a dysfunctional marriage. Our parents, markets and capitalism are fighting. My job is to help you navigate this dysfunctional household, whether you're a capitalist or anti-capitalist, so that we can at least talk about what's going on with more accuracy. And hopefully, together, we can figure out whether or not we are leaving home or we're going to somehow fix this arrangement and make it a little more stable for all of us.