Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Too Little,Too Late 175in its own past? Yes, I have added the simple point that itslimited domain is a limit on its capacity to achieve efficientallocations.I have also added that the market system requires a set ofconditions, like property law, without which it cannot existand yet which drastically limit the efficiencies that it canthen achieve. Its distinctive efficiency is efficient voluntarychoice, yet such choices require a prior set of largely compulsory“choices.” To achieve the efficiencies of the marketsystem requires that a society bear the inefficiencies ofprior determinations.I can add too that through redistributive taxation andtransfer payments, as through unemployment compensation,market societies can, if they wish, greatly improve theefficiency of prior determinations. That would make themarket system, in its tandem relation with prior determinations,a far more effective instrument of efficiency than ithas ever been. Here again we find a reason for believing thatmarket systems can be better than any are.Yet I have added too that the market system itself obstructssome improvements in prior determinations thatwould otherwise make market-system results or outcomesmore efficient. The market is in that sense a peculiar institution.Confined by its foundations in custom and law, itinhibits many of the changes in them that could make outcomesmore efficient.Persistence of Prior DeterminationsMight the prior allocations themselves be outcomes of earliermarket transactions rather than allocations by law andcustom? Might I hold, for example, assets not because customor law allocated them to me but because I bought them