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Market Whys and Human Wherefores: Thinking About Markets, Politics, and People - By David Jenkins

Challenge, Sept, 2000 by Edward Chase

Market Whys and Human Wherefores: Thinking About Markets, Politics, and People. By DAVID JENKINS. London, New York: Cassell, 2000. 276 PP. $24.95, paper.

What uniquely distinguishes David Jenkins's book is that he troubles, like Job himself, tirelessly, tiresomely sometimes, to grapple with the ultimate Buncombe of the market mantra--the masses', not least the economists', willing suspension of disbelief in the market's fated perfectibility because it is ever self-correcting. Hence Jenkins's acronym TINA--"There Is No Alternative" (to the market). Jenkins, a bishop--yes, the genuine former Bishop of Durham, England--is not quite up to, say, Robert Kuttner's rigorous critical analysis of market theory, Everything for Sale. But he is bright and brave, and he painfully spells out the market's defining essences--that the market only responds to cash demand, responds strictly to exchange value, and is confined to transactions for pecuniary gain, oblivious to external social costs, external social benefits, indeed any considerations "external" to the market and its calculations. Yes, we all remember Ec. 101, or was it Ec. 401?

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There are a thousand libraries of books disowning, exposing, dismissing the price market system, from every hostile stance, from Marx to Pope John Paul II. So is Jenkins's effort really worth it? Why, yes. It is because Jenkins is not only stubborn and deft in his deconstructive analysis of the market's rationale, but also compelling in delineating its increasing social costs today, stress "increasing."

Jenkins knows the odds against him. His chapter 2 is entitled "The Apology of an Anxious Idiot," risking being taken as "an ignorant, misinformed man." It is a disarming admission, but he is willing to be the "bishop who misbehaves" in daring to question the faith, TINA. Jenkins is, in fact, a "public intellectual," an invaluable breed whose stars have included Adolf A. Berle, Walter Lippmann, and, of course, that all-court-player, economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He surmises that continuing to leave everything for the market to settle equitably would require a ten- to perhaps forty-fold increase in production, consumption, and profit "if there were to be enough 'trickle down' to spread market prosperity effectively around the population of this globe.... I fear for my grandchildren." In England the trickle down should suffice for his grandchildren, perhaps. But to spread a passable degree of market prosperity to the global majority in the new millennium? Not bloody likely.

He goes on to write, "I cannot believe that the whole dynamic of societal interchange and personal relationships depends upon the magnification of self-interest to and beyond the threshold of greed." (Shades of the late Columbia University economist dear Robert Lekachman's last book, with its lovely title, Greed Is Not Enough, on Reaganomics.) Jenkins in a similar vein writes, "Love, longing and compassion are as much a real part of us as self-interested suspicion, greed and ambition." Now cheers mingled with boos greet the statistic that the booming American economy has increased the number of billionaires from 66 to 268 in the past decade, while 44 million Americans lack health insurance, among other familiar downer stats.

Jenkins senses a new consciousness that the market's magical guide to pricing, an infallible information system, its unique virtue in guaranteeing the highest rate of return on capital, is now being outweighed by its external costs. These are, most notoriously, environmental damage and poverty, colossal inequality. A core despair is over child poverty, children under the age of sixteen, with the greatest cause of death among these children suicide, worse than automobile accidents or leukemia, the crippling of millions of the next generation. In street lingo, this is what must be deemed a "serious charge." Jenkins is charging that the market's alleged disconnection to any considerations external to the market makes it complicit in externalities, its social costs. Indeed, they arise directly out of market transactions and now loom as possibly threatening global security itself, social cohesion itself. Jenkins scoffs at the claim of the market's unique role as an infallible "information system," observing that, "People who have unmet needs [his italics] but no money are nonentities as far as the Market information system is concerned." Touche.

Jenkins's alarm over the unshackled reign of laissez-faire and minimalist government reflects anxiety over the resultant political power shift to the constituencies of wealthy conservatives becoming an entrenched plutocracy. Jenkins's plea is for humanity to take on new twenty-first century risks (his emphasis)--to shift from "competitive risks the early capitalists took to collaborative and political risks" designed so that in a longer-than-quarterly earnings run "all shall profit." Jenkins's argumentation does not just rest on abstract theory. He writes, for one example, that the market is hopelessly slow in adjusting to externalities, and cites natural resources exhaustion and pollution: "Natural occurrences such as the 1997/8 forest fires in Indonesia and the Amazon are amplified into environmental disasters by indiscriminate logging practices dictated solely by profit. Environmental attempts to control, say, noxious emissions, become a matter of bargaining between experts working for the fuel industries and government advisers who fear the reactions of car owning voters."

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Market Whys and Human Wherefores: Thinking About Markets, Politics, and People - By David Jenkins

Challenge, Sept, 2000 by Edward Chase

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