I’m not sure if you’re saying what I think you’re saying, but if you’re saying that there’s value in physics models that assume massless frictionless vacuums as simplifying assumptions, even though we know that no such thing exists, then I would agree with you.
Textbook formulas for economic behavior may assume perfect information and frictionless trades and non-sticky wages and zero-delay information transfer and all the rest, because otherwise everything would be so couched in exceptions and complications that it would be impossible to teach. We know the world isn’t perfect like that, and Ph.D economists spend a lot of time sorting out how the imperfections affect the models.
However, this doesn’t change the fact that free markets approach these ideals, with many noted exceptions (sometimes quite large - information asymmetry has broken the health insurance market). But the exceptions are notable only because in the vast majority of cases, the market does very well.
I bought my desk from Staples almost ten years ago. It was cheap, and made of substances that typically don’t stand up all that well - veneered particleboard, mainly. Twenty years ago, such desks would have come apart in a few years, with the veneer peeling off, the furniture becoming wobbly, etc. This thing still looks and feels new, and I’m pretty hard on my desks. Glues have gotten better, veneers have gotten better, assembly techniques have improved, manufacturing tolerances are tighter.
And I don’t have to know anything about glues, because the company that makes the furniture does, and they discriminate between glue suppliers. The glue suppliers in turn have a vested interest in educating their corporate customers on the various values of their particular brand. Corporate buyers become experts because they buy large quantities and a little information can save a lot of money.
And so it goes. As people cooperate and sell each other intermediate products up the supply chain, quality is assessed at each level. In my company, we were working on a big sale of some software, and the customer actually sent software engineers into our offices to assess our practices and validate for themselves what our quality was like. We had to show them our QA reports, our test scaffolds, etc. Much the same thing happens every time we renew our ISO9001 certification as well.
And yet, I didn’t know any of these things. I was a pretty ignorant consumer - I bought what looked nice and what gave me maximum space within my budget. I wouldn’t have known good glue from bad, or cheap veneer from good veneer. And yet, I got a quality desk mainly by shopping at a store I trust and buying a brand I had heard of before.
And consumers ARE more educated. Dramatically so. The internet has revolutionized consumption. It’s much harder today for a company to create a lemon of a product and still sell it. Price competition has gotten fierce, because it’s so easy to compare prices. Customer reviews can be found for anything, in large enough quantities that you can get a pretty good sample size to ignore the outliers or the unreasonably happy or disgruntled. Poor products have a much tougher time finding a market than they once did.