Change in U.S. household consumption patterns 1984-2007

Data source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey.

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Religiosity in Israel

Legend: Shades of blue – Jewish (Ultra-orthodox [bottom], religious, traditional-religious, traditional-not-so-religious, not religious), White – no religion or atheist, Red – Christian, Yellow – Druze, Green – Muslim, Gray – unknown.

Data file: Israel religiosity.txt

Data source: Israel Bureau of Statistics, Social Survey.

“Free market”, revisited

I argued before that the standard definition of a free market [“a market in which prices of goods and services are arranged completely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers”, as it was defined on Wikipedia in March 2008, or “a market without economic intervention and regulation by government except to enforce ownership (“property rights”) and contracts”, as Wikipedia defines it today] does not clearly correspond to any specific situation in society, but rather leaves tremendous discretion to whoever sets the rules of “ownership”.

In fact, as I added in the comments, this discretion is essentially unlimited: given any desired resource allocation, it is possible to set up an ownership and “free market” system that would guarantee that allocation as its outcome. To achieve a certain allocation of resources, each of the group members is assigned “ownership” or “property rights” of the means of productions of those resources. Partial ownership can be assigned to those means of production whose output needs to be shared. Ownership can even be made non-transferable so that the arrangement is permanent. An example of such non-transferable ownership exists in all present day societies in ownership of oneself (and other less established arrangements).