Except, perhaps, for the terms "supply" and "demand," there is perhaps no word that is more prevalent than market. It is in the market that supply offers itself to demand, and it to the market that demand has recourse in order to find supply. "The Market," indeed, may be called the controlling image or metaphor of economic theory. But how closely does the economists' market resemble any market in the real world?
The argument of the following essay is that "the market" is an assumption that is both conventionalized and culture-bound. The assumptions that are made about the market--assumptions that govern conventional economic thought, and which are taught in most if not all basic economics textbooks--do not apply equally or in the same way within all societies, or for all groups within one society.
On a global level, the assumption that markets work the same everywhere may cause profound misperceptions about how some national economies function. The workings of the Japanese economy, for example, perhaps have less to do with some national Japanese economic strategy than with predispositions that are deeply rooted in Japanese culture, and which express themselves across the spectrum of employer-employee behavior within firms, transactions among firms, and the relationship of workers and firms alike with the state. On a national level, preconceptions about markets may distort our understanding of what is going on in a given economy. The global mobility of capital, for example, may prove to have wildly different effects on different types of American workers. On a cultural level, at once broader and more personal, assumptions rooted in the common image of the market may cause much of economic life to vanish from view. A substantial fraction of the total production of services in the American economy (and other economies as well) is performed by housewives, but their output appears nowhere on economic charts, and applying ...