[mrow84]

Yes - I have a tendency to waffle, and it seems that editing came at the expense of my actual opinion, namely that a concern for both production and allocation is vital for a stable society.

Significant advantage has been found in organising redistribution of goods (and services, another important mechanism of wealth production, as pdonis mentioned in a sibling comment), and it clearly isn't something to be ignored, my point is only that a lot of the contemporary approach to thinking about economies focuses almost entirely on allocation/distribution - production is taken as a given, driven largely by demand through the allocation mechanism.

And to clarify - it is not even the first order effects (e.g. worse conditions the closer you are to "mere" production) that I find most concerning (though they are serious issues), but the higher-order effects of how society manages and maintains its productive capabilities, and prevents them from causing longer-term harms, simply because those harms aren't handled by the system of allocation.

The common response within the current mental framework is to try and manage those harms through the allocative system, by creating markets for them, but fundamentally the incentives simply aren't there in the way that they are for the allocation of things people want - they have to be coerced, and so people try to game the system.

No easy answers, unfortunately!