[catlifeonmars]

> To the extent you can imagine the market as a gradient descent optimization, coordination problems are where it gets stuck in a local minimum.

I think this is a very appropriate analogy.

A thought: the cost function that the market minimizes is only a proxy for the various cost functions that we (humans) actually care about. I wonder how much (if any) “government inefficiency” is due to the mismatch between the market cost function and these other cost functions.

[TeMPOraL]

I don't know about inefficiency within the government, but I think most of regulating of markets happens because of it. As you've noticed, market's cost function is only an approximation of what we care about in aggregate. Regulation adds constraints and tweaks coefficients to keep the two goal functions aligned as much as possible. Which is hard, not least because we can't fully articulate what we care about, either individually or in aggregate.