Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Market-System Coordination 47for countless scarce objects and performances. To this explosivesituation the market system brings a solution. Itlimits every person’s claims to a sum of money obtainableby that person’s offer of something of value on the market: arule—look at it as a political rule—of quid pro quo. Up tothe limit of that sum, each person can then make whateverspecific claims—for shoes, travel, or fame—for which thefunds are sufficient. A potential for war of all against all isconverted into a peaceful process—a political accomplishmentof extraordinary sweep and efficacy.The procedure is supported both by law and popular acquiescence.Even when they protest it as inequitable, mostparticipants continue by and large to live by it. They do notpush their individual claims much beyond what the rule ofquid pro quo permits, thereby avoiding injuries that wouldotherwise be inflicted in a violent struggle.The market system has played a much larger role inpeacekeeping than it has been credited with in history. Thesociologist Barrington Moore suggests that men of overweeningambition long pursued riches and power throughviolence: Alexander, Caesar, Attila, and the warring lords ofWestern Europe and early twentieth-century China. Notuntil late in history did ambitious men turn instead to themarket to attain great wealth and power: the Fuggers, theRothschilds, and the American robber barons, and nowSoros and Gates. The anthropologist Leopold Pospisil tells aparallel story. Papuans in New Guinea, he found, are of twostrategies for acquisition: highlanders raid each other, andlowlanders trade with each other. The alternatives are sometimessharply presented: either get what one wants by takingit from another, or get it by an offer of a quid pro quo.One is a formula for violence, the other for peace.Perhaps the dominance in our minds of the quid pro quo