Another note in a series on Is the American Dream Killing You? by Paul Stiles.
The prologue put me off right away. It’s addressed in the second-person singular and purports to describe my life as an overwhelmingly stressful combination of commute, work, family dysfunction and impotence. Thanks, Mr Stiles! As it happens, Your Humble Blogger does not commute, does no paid work, and has no complaints about the others. The sound of the alarm going off may, to some people, signal the start of a day’s worth of anxiety, but for me, it just tells me that I can’t go back to sleep for an hour or so, until my Best Reader is at school. Of course, by then I don’t want to go back to sleep, since my day is actually quite nice, consisting as it does of blogging, reading and housework. But then, perhaps Mr. Stiles is not writing to me, but to someone whose life really is similar to the one he posits. I doubt it, though. The purpose of this sort of thing is to set up a certain above-it-all superiority on the part of the author and the reader, to draw the two together as they peer at the sad sack of a “you” in the story. I suspect many people—most of the people who eventually read this book—will recognize more of themselves in the prologue than I did, but they will still, I think, emerge with a sense that unlike the prologue “you”, the reader is not going to be pushed around by The Market. Which is crap. If The Market is killing us, it isn’t just killing those of us who participate in it the most eagerly. Or if it is just killing those, then why should I care?
But that’s just the prologue. There’s an introduction, too. In it, Mr. Stiles not only defines The Market (it is, evidently, the active economic principle, voddevah dot means) but indulges in a little Googlism, as if that were in some way informative and enlightening. He takes metaphors for insights into how people actually think, which is tricky business. Sometimes, figures of speech really do come about because people think metaphorically, and thus I think it’s fair to say our tendency to describe Wall Street as speaking with one voice betrays our desire to view the stock market as a rational, correct process, an aggregation of tiny self-interested actions that accumulate into a sort of Artificial Intelligence. On the other hand, people do not speak of bear markets or bull markets because we think the market is anything like an animal. This is crap.
Look, it is true that there is something, an aggregate that we call The Market, which is primarily, I think, an ethical or philosophical system in that it is a way of deciding what to do. It is different from other ethical systems, I think, in that it doesn’t give a crap about a lot of the stuff other systems do, like truth, or justice, or power, or the Creator, or the afterlife, or people. It cares about efficiency. As such, and as it defines efficiency in its own terms, in market terms, it’s a terrible guide for human behavior. Everybody knows this. Nobody is telling us, explicitly, that it’s a good guide for human behavior. So why do we tell ourselves, implicitly, that it is a good guide, and why do we penalize people for refusing its dicta? More importantly, how can we, as a society, remove the incentives that the market, the economic system of incentives, naturally gives to The Market, the ethical system of choices? Mr. Stiles doesn’t seem to know.