Description
Book SynopsisBringing a fresh perspective to current debates over the “free market,” this wide-ranging look at how market economies are designed and constructed helps us understand how “the market” works and how we can build fairer and more effective markets.
Trade Review"Offers keen insights into urban planning, public works, and even the history of New York’s onetime ambivalence toward a professional police force." * New York Times *
"Marshall’s thoughtful critique accounts for social dynamics often ignored by modern economists and is grounded in a multitude of fascinating examples, underscoring his thesis that we can, and should, debate the powers allotted to our creations, rather than let them, falsely, set the terms of their own existence." * Publishers Weekly *
"Conventional economics wittingly or unwittingly provides cover for the One Percent, by professing that ‘the market’ operates benevolently on its own. Alex Marshall gives us an entertaining, thoughtful, and well-written antidote to this dangerous abstraction." * Huffington Post *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. The Designer Disappears: Markets and Their Makers
Section One. On the Books: The Markets We Make by Law
- Chapter One. Coming into Being: In Praise of Markets
- Chapter Two. Me and Mine: Property, the First Market
- Chapter Three. Lex Non Scripta: The Laws We Don't Make, or, the Common Law
- Chapter Four. I Am My Brother's Keeper: Cooperatives
- Chapter Five. Trust: How We Cooperate to Compete
- Chapter Six. Staking Claims on the Mind: Intellectual Property
- Chapter Seven. Little Commonwealths: Corporations and the State That Creates Them
- Chapter Eight. The Future of Corporations
Section Two. Infrastructure: The Markets We Make by Hand
- Chapter Nine. From Highways to Health Care: Progress through Infrastructure
- Chapter Ten. Making Places
- Chapter Eleven. The Great Nineteenth-Century Train Robbery
- Chapter Twelve. A Socialist Paradise: The American Road System
- Chapter Thirteen. Waiting for a Train Station
- Chapter Fourteen. What We Did Before: Path Dependence and Markets
- Chapter Fifteen. Police and Prisons: Freedom, Security, and Democracy
- Chapter Sixteen. Why Don't You Make Me? Government and Force
Section Three. Seeding the Fields: The Markets We Make in Our Minds
- Chapter Seventeen. Common Tongue, Common Culture, Common Markets
Section Four. The Markets We Build Abroad
- Chapter Eighteen. By Your Bootstraps: Developing Countries and Markets
- Chapter Nineteen. Last Night upon the Stairs: International Law
Section Five. Looking Forward: Making Better Markets
- Conclusion. Making Better Markets
- Afterword. My Own Story: A Circuitous Journey
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
