Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Too Little,Too Late 171other society others. The pattern is never wholly fixed, butin important respects, all market societies are similar. Theyall assign individual rights to land rather than hold it all collectively.The same goes for rights to shares of assets of corporations.And all societies assign assets unequally.A first conclusion, then, is that one cannot explain thepattern of output or results in any market system by pointingexclusively to market transactions, for the pattern is alwaysa result of both the transactions and the prior determinationstaken together. Whether, for example, markettransactions result in large expenditures on luxuries orlarge expenditures on necessities is in large part decided bythe pattern of prior determinations.Every current generation sits on an accumulation of assetsproduced by a sequence of earlier generations. In industrializedand postindustrialized societies, the accumulationis mountainous. The assets are distributed largely throughcustom and law governing inheritance. The distribution onthe whole is not thoughtful, nor has it been calculated toachieve such an objective as the public interest or commongood. What each of us inherits, aside from genetic factors, isin large part shaped by a long, long history of war, conquest,looting, deceit, and intimidation, and law on property andinheritance. I am the great-great-grandson of Swedish peasants.The small stock of assets they possessed was in largepart decided by historically distant pillage and conquestthat shunted their ancestors and them down the path ofpeasantry. What they left to their son, my great-grandfather,was accordingly limited, sufficient only to permit his migrationto America. The law eventually handed his limitedassets on to my grandparents and subsequently their assetsto their son, my father, whose small total of assets vanishedin the Great Depression.