Free markets and their discontents

This was the column’s heading for pieces about markets that work exactly as designed and produce a result somebody finds hard to accept. The one article filed here follows two professions in opposite directions — airline pilots and hedge fund managers — and asks what changed in the pay of each without assuming that either outcome was arranged.

The portal keeps that question in its Society section, where incomes, thresholds and index formulas are applied to households, and in policy and regulation, where the rules that decide public money are read as mechanics rather than intentions. The piece below is listed under three of the column’s own headings at once, which is why it appears in more than one archive index; it has a single address, and that address has not changed.

The column let a single piece carry several headings at once, and this index reflects that rather than hiding it: the same article appears under a second and a third rubric with the same address and the same date. Nothing is duplicated in the database and no canonical address has been rewritten. A reader after the portal’s own measurement of pay, thresholds and index formulas will find it in the sections linked above; this page exists to keep the author’s filing intact.