Thanks those are really nice words. Yeah you echo a lot of my own feelings. In my early twenties I was quite a capitalism fanboy from having read Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and others who showed many compelling reasons for why market economies often work so well.

Then as I started experiencing more of the world, reading more history about how countries actually developed I saw that the claims made by these titans of free market capitalism didn't quite stack up.

In particular I remember there was all these predictions and claims about what countries were making the smart moves. Then 2008 happened and you saw most of the countries who were supposed to be the golden boys of free market capitalism failed in a big way.

In particular as a Nordic I had come to believe that the rapid liberalization of the Icelandic economy was something we had to follow in Norway as I could see Iceland sporting very robust economic growth. 2008 showed that a lot of that "growth" was fake asset bubbles.

I still think free market economics has a lot going for it, but I am far more skeptical of it. I think people who preach is in a gospel like manner cannot be trusted.

But the prisoners dilemma is certainly a good intellectual tool to explain in logical terms why free markets don't always give good results. Unfortunately many of the left are not familiar with it and prefer much more emotionally charged argumentation. I am much more of a firm believer in criticizing capitalism using logic and reason rather than appealing to emotion.

But that flaw exists on both sides IMHO. It is pretty common to see any criticism of capitalism dismissed as if the one presenting the point is Stalin incarnated and ready to collectivize all the farms and stuff you in a huge apartment complex and gunpoint.

There are changes within the field of economics though. I was at a talk which presented a way of simulating and modeling economies as made up of many different participants with different wealth, incomes and abilities. Usually economic models only work with averages. These new more complex models however can actually model things like development of inequality poverty, wealth concentration etc.

I think with more detailed models like that it will become more apparent why extreme forms of market liberalism doesn't work that well.