Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Quid Pro Quo 119£35 per hour. Ten years ago, you provided the same servicesto the same number of people at a much lower price, evenadjusting for inflation. Now that you are paid more than before,can we say that your contribution to market cooperationhas risen? We might say that, although you make thesame contribution, people now value that contributionmore than before. But not necessarily. Perhaps all that haschanged is the distribution of wealth and income, with theresult that some people who earlier valued your services noless than they do now are now able to spend more on them,thus raising the price you can charge. Generalized, that conclusionmeans that because what the market pays anyonedepends on the existing distribution of wealth and income,we cannot estimate a person’s market contribution (to saynothing of other contributions) by looking at what one ispaid.Look at the discrepancy in another way. To obtain hisgreat share of society’s income and wealth, John D. Rockefellerneeded a market for oil, a technology for oil extractionand refining, railroads, and capital markets. Bill Gates neededa market for computer software, an educated population, atelephone system, and capital markets, among other things.Take any one component away and the whole accomplishmentfails. What any individual can accomplish in marketcooperation depends on the skills, capacities, and placementof the others and thus on the degree and quality of organizationof the whole system. Given such interdependence,that one’s market contribution (again, to say nothingof one’s other contributions) can be or should be measuredby what one can sell is at least highly disputable. The marketvalue of what one can sell at a price is neither the obviousmeasure nor the only measure of it.For yet another reason, one’s market contribution di-