The Market

Description

We have become accustomed to economists and politicians talking about “market forces” as if they are immutable laws of the universe. But what exactly is “the market”? Originally an abstract idea from economic theory – the locus of supply and demand – it has come to inform the way we speak about our relationship to the economic system as a whole. Matthew Watson unpacks the concept to ask what does it really mean to allow ourselves to submit to market forces. And does economic theory really provide insights into the market institutions that shape our everyday life? In tackling these questions, the book provides a major contribution to a deeper appreciation of the dominant economic language of our time, challenging the idea that we can simply defer to the “logic of the market”. Title page......Page 3 Copyright......Page 4 Contents......Page 5 Acknowledgements......Page 7 The power of “the market”......Page 9 The problem......Page 12 The thingification of “the market”......Page 14 The dethingification of “the market”......Page 17 Politicians talking themselves down......Page 20 The structure of the book......Page 22 Introduction......Page 25 The market as a descriptive concept......Page 28 The market as an analytical concept......Page 32 The market as a formalist concept......Page 34 The market concept in the economics textbooks......Page 36 Conclusion......Page 43 Introduction......Page 45 The impartial spectator and the sympathy procedure......Page 48 Market coordination from Smith’s perspective......Page 54 Smith and the language of “demand and supply”......Page 59 Conclusion......Page 64 Introduction......Page 69 Marshall and his predecessors......Page 72 Disagreements amongst Marshall’s predecessors......Page 79 Controversies surrounding the diagram’s underpinning behavioural assumptions......Page 84 Conclusion......Page 89 Introduction......Page 93 Walras’s early studies of general equilibrium......Page 97 The road to Arrow and Debreu’s existence theorem......Page 102 The economics of the formalist market concept......Page 107 Conclusion......Page 113 Introduction......Page 115 The deification of “the market”......Page 118 The automatic pilots of “the market”......Page 123 The red herrings of “the market”......Page 128 Conclusion......Page 134 What I have done......Page 137 What is left to do......Page 140 “The market” and distributional politics......Page 144 Final words......Page 149 Glossary......Page 151 Bibliography......Page 157 Index......Page 175