If we didn't change society to prevent air pollution in the 70s then we would all live in smog everywhere. Such changes are not rought about by the market. They are real changes in society and expressed in laws and governance.
Government is not all bad. Not all institutions are useless.
In fact, i'd say most institutions are important for society.
On the contrary, The use catalytic converter and the phaseout of Tetraethyl lead was already in progress when those regulations came in. Advances in fuel technology would soon have made TEL completely unnecessary. Laws have always lagged behind societal changes.
Sure, laws and government are institutionalized forms of these changes. They serve as the compass.
The point was that the changes are not caused by a market correction but by humans.
What do you think the market is? It
is humans.
The market is a system created and used by humans as a way of exchange.
It has no morality of its own. By itself it doesn't care about rich or poor or sick or old.
So if this system moves in a way we don't like and we want it to act more morally then we need to make the changes ourselfs and cannot simply wait untill the need is so big that the market must follow.
We need to be proactive if we want to fix it without taking heavy damage.
Maybe the markets have become such complex systems as to evoke emergent properties (like intelligence) such that these properties are not directly observable by its constituents.
Do you think a muscle cell knows how intelligent or what the actions/intentions are of the body it is a part of?