Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

162 What To Make of Itcomplexity of the social world, participants in any socialsystem, including rulers, bring only fallible capacity, evenwhen that capacity is extended through devices rangingfrom pencils to computers. Infinite problems, but only finitebrains. Again, we can only point to the market system’sattributes, like efficiency prices, that give it an advantageover alternative systems.InequalityA topic that refuses to go away is inequality in distribution—ofincome and wealth, as well as of position and opportunity.With their quid pro quo rule, market systemsproduce great inequalities A United Nations estimate isthat one-fifth of the world’s people consume 86 percent ofthe world’s services and goods, the bottom fifth less than 3percent. The World Health Organization estimates that theworld spends $56 billion annually on health research. Lessthan 10 percent of the money goes to research on the diseasesof the poor 90 percent of world population, a populationwith distinctive diseases—tropical, for example. Withinindustrial nations, inequalities in wealth are reduced (withinsocioeconomic classes but not much between classes) but ofcourse not eliminated by the redistributions of the welfarestate. Taking those redistributions into account, the richest1 percent in Britain in 1989 held 13 percent of Britishwealth; the richest 1 percent in the United States, 22 percentof American wealth.But inequality characterizes all large-scale social systemsother than those imaginary ones in which equality iswritten into the blueprint. Past and present market systemsdo not remove and sometimes exacerbate the inequalitycharacteristic of large-scale social systems. Yet through