The author did not directly relate his arguments to his Nobel prize winning work initiating the field of “Information Economics” which includes not only the market economy, but the political economy.
From Gary, Indiana, he perceived that the city, now in decline had, even in its heydey, been plagued by “poverty, periodic unemployment, and massive racial discrimination.” He found Adam’s Smith’s “invisible hand” theory of the efficiency of markets to be unpersuasive in their denial of economic discrimination. His mission as an economist became that if the theory that “we were living in the best of all possible worlds – were true, it seemed to me that we should be striving to create a different world.”
Having read his Nobel lecture, I arrived at a question not raised there nor here, of whether the current administration has, in its quest to privatize in the absense of governance based on information, ignored wealth creation across the board, and instead, contributed to the stipping of assets and destruction of wealth of a large sector in order to enrich a small minority. This would explain the growing disparity in wealth and assets in the U.S..