Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Personality and Culture 209efits for development of personality and character. Wealth—here compare Western Europe with much of Latin America—raises the level of education, widens the range of experiencesthat people enjoy, acquaints them with various lifestyles from which they can choose, and possibly turns themaway from invidiousness.Some stereotypes of the wealthy are insulting, yet theymay represent some truths about the personalities of peoplewhose wealth is much greater than that of those aroundthem. But research suggests that when whole societies becomerelatively wealthy, as in Western Europe and NorthAmerica, they tend to develop in their members the kindsof personality traits that Western thought has long prized:higher levels of moral reasoning, self-reliance, sense of responsibility,and capacity to handle cognitive complexity.Some research makes an even stronger claim: that notonly wealth but market participation itself tends to producethese and other qualities of character. Market participants,engaged as they are in never-ending choices, see themselvesas in control of themselves and their lives. They see theirown decisions as making a difference to both the near futureand to life aspirations. In a market system they attributeto themselves—even if with some touch of self-deceit—power,autonomy, or independence, all together withresponsibility. And these attributes of personality, noteworthyin themselves, then support self-esteem, often consideredthe fundamental human aspiration. In the absenceof money and markets, the situation on these several scoreswould be transformed. Centralist coordinating decisionswould displace many of their own individual decisions.How much of a burden of choice and self-reliance canmarket participants carry? Sixty years ago the psychoanalystErich Fromm argued that Germans fled into fascism