Another note in a series on Is the American Dream Killing You? by Paul Stiles.
The subtitle of the book is “How ‘The Market’ Rules Our Life’. Mr. Stiles doesn’t do a good job of defining what he means by The Market, and it reads as if he believes in a big bad Market under the bed, a Market with a will and a goal, and unless you buy into that right away, it doesn’t make any sense. So. Here’s an attempt, just Your Humble Blogger’s attempt, to make Mr. Stiles’s’sses concept of The Market smell a little less of superstition. Why does The Market want us to maximize transactions?
OK, Caleb goes out and cuts down a tree, cuts and dries bits of it, makes himself a table and chairs. He’s down one tree and up one dining room set, but there hasn’t actually been a transaction. No money has changed hands. In a market system, a monetary system of any kind, really, this is important to the guy because he has no savings. Even if he doesn’t want to buy anything today, he may want to buy something tomorrow, so he needs some money in the bank for a rainy day. So he cuts another tree and makes another table and chairs and sells it. And now there’s a market. There isn’t The Market yet, but there’s a market.
OK, so Bruno needs some money in the bank as well, and he sees Caleb’s table and chairs, and he thinks How can I get in on this? So he cuts down trees for Caleb and sells his tree-cutting service for wages. Now there’s a labor market. And Yves-Alain, perhaps, sells his table-selling hours for wages. And then, perhaps, Mart’n sells his wood-dryng services for wages. Or, even better, Mart’n and Bruno go into business together cutting and drying wood, and they just sell the lumber to Caleb, who then sells the tables and chairs to Yves-Alain, who has his own store now, and pays Lech and H�rst to run it, and Patrick to clean up after hours, and now there’s The Market.
It’s not that The Market wants us to maximize transactions. It’s that each person in The Market wants a transaction for himself, and the easiest way to do that is to add another layer of transactions between the raw stuff and the finished product. And, as it happens, that’s a good way to make the process efficient, as well. The whole gang of them will specialize in one little layer within the system, and they will all make more chairs and tables than if each of them cut down a tree. But nobody needs to care about that, although some of them will, of course; all they need to care about is making one more layer of transactions.
Now, of course, it could happen that instead of adding a layer of transactions to Caleb’s chair business, Yves-Alain or Mart’n could just go into competition, making tables and chairs like Caleb does, which wouldn’t have that effect. But what if they lose that competition? No, better and easier to just piggyback on the market that already exists. Better to carve yourself out your own niche, and not have any competition. After all, in a competitive system, somebody loses, right? But in The Market we all work together to make money for everybody.
So when I say, with Mr. Stiles, that The Market wants us to maximize transactions, I don’t mean that there is anybody out there who cares how many transactions I make over the course of the day. There are, however, a lot of people who want me to make just one more transaction, the one that gives them my money. And the cumulative effect of a zillion people telling me to make just one more transaction is that I hear The Market telling me to make a zillion more transactions. And it’s not in anybody’s interest, not in their financial interest anyway, to tell me that I’ve had enough, and I shouldn’t make any more transactions at all. So The Market doesn’t have any competitors in that. The aggregrate of all the messages individuals send me overlaps in a few places, and I can anthropomorphize the overlap and call it The Market, and say The Market wants this, and The Market wants that, and it isn’t a monster under the bed, or even a conspiracy, just the outcome of everybody pushing the same way.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
And it’s not in anybody’s interest, not in their financial interest anyway, to tell me that I’ve had enough, and I shouldn’t make any more transactions at all.
It’s in your interest to make fewer transactions. It’s quite possibly in your Best Reader’s interest and my interest and david’s interest to tell you to make fewer transactions. I believe it is in my interest to tell you to make fewer transactions.
Lest I be accused of not following through on my interest in this particular case, I hereby say:
V, please make fewer transactions.
Now there are many reasons why you might choose to listen to the multitude of voices who will encourage you otherwise. Some of those reasons are good reasons, but most are a symptom of our failure to properly insulate ourselves and each other from the noise machine of the Market, a symptom of the absence of quiet voices both internal and external bearing contrary witness. A symptom of the dissolution of our traditional communities in favor of corporatization.
But is it in your financial interest for me to make fewer transactions? And is it in my financial interest to make fewer transactions, or to make more revenue-bearing transactions?
But, yes, there are people telling me to slow down on the transactions, but certainly they are far outnumbered by the transactioneers. By the noise machine of the Market.
I do think that we are, in our current set-up, actually quite good at distinguishing between people telling us things to advance their financial interests and people telling us things to advance some other interest. I may listen to your advice, Michael, or david’s, because it is disinterested (financially), and dismiss the thirty ads I saw this morning, because I know they are just selling something. And in ignoring their specific messages of consumption, I also ignore their general message of consumption. But the messages are there.
And I think that’s what I am getting at. When we anthropomorphize The Market, and say that we are getting all these messages from The Market, I assume that we are able to distinguish those messages from individuals and groups that come from The Market and those that don’t. That makes it possible for the anthropomophic Market to make sense, to be shorthand for something that actually exists.
Thanks,
-V.
For a little whimsy along the same lines, there’s Rosenbaum’s Second Aphorism:
Yes, I know you’re trying very carefully to make the point that markets are just collections of people doing what’s in their own financial interests that all adds up to an aggregate voice a sesquillion dollars loud. I think it’s also possible to say that the whole is something different from the sum of its parts — not something alien to us, as Stiles would (allegedly) have it, but made of us and distinctly not just a lot of uss’s’ses.