> It’s governed by laws beyond our control as surely as the behavior of materials are governed by thermodynamics.
It's funny you make this comparison. Because so many of these supposed laws about "the market" violate an effective equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics for information systems: P=/=NP. The claims often made about the transcendent nature of the laws governing "the market" violate the computational properties of reality as we understand it [1]. If "the market" behaved as so many claim then we would have proof of P=NP.
Evolution is also an emergent behavior, of biochemical systems. But we also understand how it functions as an algorithm. So much so we now use it to aid in the design the wing shapes of our planes, the design of new high efficiency radios, and to find new algorithms.
The entire universe is governed by laws beyond our control. That doesn't prevent us from understanding them and bending them to our will. As we have done with ropes and levers, atoms and proteins, so too can we understand and engineer markets.
As it happens markets are likely in a similar class of algorithm as evolution: efficient approximations of NP problems. This is why people use markets as the basis of things like prediction markets, scheduling algorithms, and bin packing.
"The market" is a claim to the "god is in the gaps" no different than intelligent design is. It even does the whole song and dance of elevating an approximation algorithm to some unknowable divine will. An approximation algorithm we already understand and use in engineering everyday.
[1] Make no mistake, bits of information are physically connected to reality, a non-trivial NP algorithm running on human timescales would boil the oceans. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle