I do love A Bit of Fry & Laurie. This is quite a brilliant sketch, whatever you make of its politics. Maybe not quite as good as their free-market-police bit, but right up there.
Of course, market forces really are a fiction. A mutually agreed upon one, to be sure, but only as tangible as we allow them to be. Markets are the new culture, that other mutually agreed upon fiction, and maybe an evolutionary step forward. Maybe just one step among many.
In my most idealistic moments, I’m something of a stateless-socialist. Devolve all that power down and implement some Utopian system of mutually-agreed-upon norms so that everyone can exist side by side in peace and harmony, prosperous and untainted by violence and power.
In my more sober moments I’m a utilitarian pragmatist who believes that power is as inevitable and inextinguishable as energy. Power is quicksilver and won’t soak properly into the earth. You pour it out of one cup and it fills up another. Best to spread it thin then, but how?
The trend toward more liberal forms of government has been a good one: power taken from the oppressive state and given to the people. But even then, markets can no more achieve power equality than governments can achieve income equality. We need winners and losers, after all.
So we seek to strike a balance, and all this talk of the private sector being the only place where “real” jobs are created is just propaganda, no more compelling than blaming The Corporations for every ungodly thing under the sun. If I generalize and stereotype it’s because generalizations and stereotypes are the currency of political discourse, and always have been.
I suppose we could look at government and markets as merely means to ends, disabuse ourselves of first principles altogether. Take the technocrat’s razor to all our problems and forget, briefly, the human flaws that will certainly poison even the most dispassionate batch of technocrats.
Of course, even if we somehow agreed upon the ends, agreeing upon the means is even trickier.
All of which, truth be told, is just a way of me saying we should laugh at ourselves and our business and political leaders and our systems of government and our institutions as loudly and as often as possible. Maybe nothing will ever change as much as we’d like it to, or stay the same as much as we wish it could. But that’s just the hard truth of society.
We left the wilds and came to the city and the fields, planted crops and built civilizations, and it’s this proximity that keeps us safe and drives us mad. Now that we’re here, the endless argument about how to live with one another will spin on ad infinitum.
In moments of political burn-out (such as this long rut I’ve been in) we can comfort ourselves that at least lately most of our political disagreements have been hammered out with words and scribbles instead of guns and bombs.
The best Fry and Laurie are the Control and Tony sketches, which answer the burning question, what if LeCarre characters were goofy?Report
That’s a good one. I also like their stuff on language.Report
“Of course, market forces really are a fiction.”
Why are RIM and Nokia on the path to bankruptcy?
I would attribute that to “market forces.”
“Free Markets” do not exist in the positive Republican Party sense or in the negative implications implied by the Democratic Party.
“Free Markets” is a slogan.
“Markets” do exist. They existed in the USSR and they exist in North Korea.
People will attain what they desire.
Whether that be: drugs, guns, Levis or really crappy Pop music.
You can attempt to make markets “fairer,” but what that usually translates to is making incumbents richer.Report
I think you’re responding to this post in an unfortunately expected way. Yes, markets do exist, in the same way culture exists.Report
Sorry if I misinterpreted, but you should not interpret that as “unfortunately expected.”
I have a problem with “nuance.” It really cramps the social life and mostly deters me from online interaction.
In short, it was not an ideological reaction – just a misreading.
I apologize.
Back to the drawing board.Report
Except that, in abstract, culture doesn’t vary all that much either. Really, culture is just how we respond to each other (in groups, at least). I’d suggest that those things are as invariant, in the abstract, as our responses to incentives. Granted, incentives constitute a small set of social conditions, while culture is composed of significantly more of them, but all that really means is that culture allows for more combinations of largely invariant (in the abstract) behavior patterns.Report
I see what you mean Chris. If the suggestion is that having culture and having markets are both quintessentially human traits, then I agree. Min you I’m not sure I’d call either fictional. After all, just because something’s invented, doesn’t mean its not real.Report
As real, no more and no less, than any other social insitution.Report
Yeah, that works for me.Report
Why do you believe that markets exist at all?
This isn’t a leading question. I’m honestly curious how you will answer it.Report
I think markets are a process – an interaction – that functions to various degrees within various given contexts. Fiction is probably me toying a bit with hyperbole and “convention” as you suggest below is likely a better term.Report
Erik, the more I think about this post the more vehemently I disagree with it.
If the market is a fiction, what would constitute a fact for you? Presumably coercive things count as facts — but not an institution where a person may exercise an uncoerced choice. That’s fictional. Not real. Less worthy.
It sits badly with your last paragraphs, because the social contract that gives us the chance to settle such issues peacefully is equally a fiction, in your sense, and the skepticism you express toward the market falls equally on it.
May I suggest using the word “convention” instead? It carries a good deal less normative and ontological baggage. No one doubts the reality of conventional things, or the fact that humans may change them (with real consequences, of course). Conventions may be helpful or harmful, and each must be evaluated on its own merits.Report