Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

126What To Make of Itlocation process never stops, but most of us are hardlyaware of it.In any society, however, this allocation process can gobadly. Poor choices can hurt people far more than cangaudy inefficiencies, like bribery, or the failures of technologicalefficiency. Poor allocative choice in the form ofwrong products, wrong inputs, and wrong choices on maintenanceand technological innovation brought an end toSoviet and Maoist communism. In the Great Depression ofthe 1930s in the Western societies the allocative choiceprocess broke down in another way. It failed to allocate toany activity at all much of the human energy that wasavailable—in short, people were unemployed. Today theworld may need an efficient allocative process less to raiseits income than to protect past gains against decline. Forevery generation lives on the wealth of past successes, allvulnerable to erosion.Now consider a complication. Here we have an outputof steel that is highly valued by planning officials in a societybut not so highly valued either by the citizens of that society,or by you as an observer. Or here we have an allocationof steel that is highly valued by those in the marketwho buy it, but not highly valued by a team of developmenteconomists hired to advise the government on the nation’sdevelopment strategies. Whether an allocation is efficientdepends, then, on who is doing the evaluations, or on whoseevaluations count. Consequently, there is no one allocationthat is efficient—it all depends.Despite differences in evaluations, efficiency mattersgreatly to almost everyone, even though what one person orgroup applauds as efficient, another person or group may deploreas inefficient.Allocative efficiency, no matter who judges it or whose