REINVENTING THE BAZAAR

A wide-ranging, illuminating history of that old, colorful, and sometimes disgraceful institution known as the marketplace: exotic, innovative, and everyday; on terra firma and in cyberspace; bazaar to eBay.

“Reinventing” is a vital notion here, for the best markets, says McMillan (Economics/ Stanford Univ. Graduate School of Business), are those that develop from the bottom up over time through trial and error, always restless and reshaping themselves with creativity and flexibility. Shortcutting the process rarely works. Then again, markets would never attain their fullest potential without a soupçon of government intervention when age-old procedures need to be formalized and authority given to enforce the results, or as a means of “providing goods and services that markets would undersupply and acting in the background as market rule-setters and referees.” McMillan lays out the prerequisites for a successful market: “information flows smoothly; property rights are protected; people can be trusted to live up to their promises; side effects on third parties are curtailed; and competition is fostered.” He is well aware of the absurdities and cruelties such a system may spawn (patent law is a good example), though he endeavors to understand poverty and inequality as structural rather than inherent in the marketplace. McMillan has his heart in the right place and isn’t about to sniff at suffering. Unlike free-market zealots, he appreciates that markets are imperfect and can even be disastrous. They are also, he reminds us, a natural economy, “too important to be left to ideologues,” and they are “not just about money. A well-designed competitive market puts resources into the hands of those who can best use them.” Design is the issue here, a delicate balance between the organic evolution of the market and state oversight.

Felicitous economics? Hard to believe, but McMillan's prose resembles single malt, going down easy as it stimulates. Clarifying and humanistic.