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The Market Loves You: Why You Should Love It Back
The marketplace is commonly described as brutish, greed-based, cutthroat, or unrelentingly exploitative. The Market Loves You – Jeffrey Tucker’s latest collection of evocative observations of everyday products, services, and life in the market – rejects this characterization. He argues that benevolence characterizes trading relationships, entrepreneurship, work contracts, and the effects of decisions by market players. These are a civilizing, evenly lovely, institutions that embed complex human relationships that extend all over the world, involving potentially billions of people.
Every unforced decision to trade represents a spark of insight, a hope for a better future, and the instantiation of a human relationship that affirms the dignity of everyone involved, he writes. Sometimes that relationship is personal; it is even more awesome to consider the enormously complex impersonal relationships that make up the vast global networks of exchange that make our lives wonderful.
We take the results for granted because they are so much part of our daily experience. If they suddenly went missing, any aspect of what we depend on to live a better life, we would experience demoralization and even devastation. The lights go out. The gas stations close. The shelves are empty. The doctors run out of medicine. There is no one to fix the plumbing, no one to repair the heater, no one to do the surgery on my heart. This is a world that is less lovely than the world of plenty we’ve come to expect.
The institutional setting in which human relationships become real in our lives is the market. This does not entail reducing human life to dollars and cents. It is about the recognition that our value as human beings is bound up with our associations with others, our trading relationships, and the opportunities we have to value and be valued by others. Looked at this way, the moral aesthetic of the market is lovely. It fosters love. It needs love.
Every unforced decision to trade represents a spark of insight, a hope for a better future, and the instantiation of a human relationship that affirms the dignity of everyone involved, he writes. Sometimes that relationship is personal; it is even more awesome to consider the enormously complex impersonal relationships that make up the vast global networks of exchange that make our lives wonderful.
We take the results for granted because they are so much part of our daily experience. If they suddenly went missing, any aspect of what we depend on to live a better life, we would experience demoralization and even devastation. The lights go out. The gas stations close. The shelves are empty. The doctors run out of medicine. There is no one to fix the plumbing, no one to repair the heater, no one to do the surgery on my heart. This is a world that is less lovely than the world of plenty we’ve come to expect.
The institutional setting in which human relationships become real in our lives is the market. This does not entail reducing human life to dollars and cents. It is about the recognition that our value as human beings is bound up with our associations with others, our trading relationships, and the opportunities we have to value and be valued by others. Looked at this way, the moral aesthetic of the market is lovely. It fosters love. It needs love.
454 pages, Paperback
First published May 13, 2019
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86 people want to read
About the author
Jeffrey Tucker
47 books146 followersJeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is also Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna, Austria, Honorary Fellow of Mises Brazil, founder and Chief Liberty Officer of Liberty.me, an adviser to blockchain application companies, past editorial director of the Foundation for Economic Education and Laissez Faire Books, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, and author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
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November 7, 2019
91 short chapters that could be read independently. Read a little here and there. Throw it in the mix of other books. Jeffery Tucker has a way of making rather mundane things seem really interesting. I never thought I'd want to read about mechanical clocks, mexican ketchup, tuna salad, and gas cans but this guy makes it interesting. The topics range all over the place. Economics is everywhere.
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