Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

164 What To Make of Itmarket systems to be acceptably efficient without facing it.In its distribution of cooperatively produced services andgoods, the market system serves the needs or wants of somepeople far more than others, at an extreme leaving manymillions without such elementary requirements of thegood life as hygienic sewage disposal. One has to copewith—accept, qualify, or reject—the simple allegation thaton this score market systems allocate resources in a patterninefficient for the good of society, no matter how good is defined.Entrepreneurial MotivationsFinally, those very strengths of motivation that contributegreatly to the efficiencies of the market system oftenplunge it into inefficiencies—and they are not typicallysmall. I see no reason to believe that the excesses of theAmerican tobacco industry or of Swiss banking derive fromunusual moral failures of their executives. Assuming theseentrepreneurs to be neither less nor more moral than mostof us, their behavior is a consequence of the power of marketincentives. Entrepreneurs will bring the same determinationand inventiveness to product misrepresentation asto introducing a new product. Similarly, if their governmentswill not approve their food or pharmaceutical productsfor domestic customers, they will ship them abroadand there advertise their claimed virtues. And, of course,not all the losses of spillovers are attributable to the ignoranceof entrepreneurs, say, regarding what industrial wastesare doing to the environment. Their market incentives tellthem to go ahead anyway.The power of their market motivations energizes entrepreneursto struggle inventively and endlessly to avoid reg-