alt Hacker News> Manifesting the Invisible Hand requires a lot of prerequisites that are obviously untrue in the real world. Like that customers are able to do research and understand the findings.
Worse. It requires that doing so is effectively free. Otherwise, a successful strategy is to lower your product quality compared to your competitors by an amount just shy of the cost of discovering the lower quality. This leads to a race to the bottom.
Yes, and? That very “race to the bottom” is what drives progress. Yes, it’s much messier than having a central authority dictate everything. Such is life.
Making a product cheaper to produce without affecting what people care about (or, equivalently, improving the performance without increasing the cost) is what drives productivity growth, and the relentless competitive pressure to do so is what produced the modern world. It’s not fun or easy, and yes, sitting on your ass would be easier. Oh well!