The Surprising Design of Market Economies (Constructs)

The Surprising Design of Market Economies (Constructs)

Alex Marshall

Language: English

Pages: 288

ISBN: 0292717776

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The "free market" has been a hot topic of debate for decades. Proponents tout it as a cure-all for just about everything that ails modern society, while opponents blame it for the very same ills. But the heated rhetoric obscures one very important, indeed fundamental, fact—markets don't just run themselves; we create them.

Starting from this surprisingly simple, yet often ignored or misunderstood fact, Alex Marshall takes us on a fascinating tour of the fundamentals that shape markets and, through them, our daily economic lives. He debunks the myth of the "free market," showing how markets could not exist without governments to create the structures through which we assert ownership of property, real and intellectual, and conduct business of all kinds. Marshall also takes a wide-ranging look at many other structures that make markets possible, including physical infrastructure ranging from roads and railroads to water systems and power lines; mental and cultural structures such as common languages and bodies of knowledge; and the international structures that allow goods, services, cash, bytes, and bits to flow freely around the globe.

Sure to stimulate a lively public conversation about the design of markets, this broadly accessible overview of how a market economy is constructed will help us create markets that are fairer, more prosperous, more creative, and more beautiful.

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of those five judges. Legal realism is a useful tool for analysis. I would not use it as a doctrine of prescription. We do want a government of laws, and not of men, even if at key points the desires of those men, and increasingly women, overwhelm what might be called the law. LAW AND REASON We habitually think of having clear laws that are applied uniformly as being synonymous with fairness, but of course this is not the case. Laws can be synonymous with unfairness, or simply irrationality.

on me saying “Visitor, Visitor, probably from New York!” The setting for this convention is equally staid, the Sheraton Bloomington Hotel, a set of large white boxes on a parking lot off a freeway exit ramp near some strip shopping centers. Just a few miles down the road is the Mall of America, the mammoth 4-million-square-foot shopping center with an amusement park in the middle. Which makes the activities of this bunch all the more ironic. This group of middle-aged men and women, who in their

patchwork of existing roads, many of them unpaved, that were united by a numbering system that would alert travelers how to proceed. THE ENGINEER AS POLICY MAKER The story of the nation’s early road system is the story as well of the bureaucracy that planned and built it. This brings into the story an engineer and master bureaucrat, Thomas H. MacDonald, who led the Bureau of Public Roads for thirty-four years, from 1919 to 1953. It was under MacDonald that the cornerstones of our road system

well. Boosted by these possibilities, thousands of people around the country are switching to Dvorak. Dvorak has also inspired a dozen or so websites that promulgate its virtues. Its prominent users and backers include Nathan Myhrvold, formerly a top executive with Microsoft. I interviewed him way back in 1998, when I wrote an article about Dvorak for Salon Magazine. “I’m the Johnny Appleseed of Dvorak,” said Myhrvold, who noted he was instrumental in getting Dvorak into the Microsoft operating

language. This did not happen naturally or easily. Webster’s competition for elementary school classrooms was the British A New Guide to the English Tongue, by Thomas Dilworth, first printed in 1747.5 American publishers loved Dilworth, because they could print his book for free, given that international copyright law did not exist. (This situation would last through much of the nineteenth century, and would infuriate authors, like Charles Dickens, who saw little to no income from their

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