Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Bones Beneath Flesh 59interchange. I grant the superficial appearance of disorderin some markets. Despite this appearance, all the noiseand movement are part of a precise, fast-moving coordination.To supply a city with fresh produce constitutes animpressive feat of coordination, yet the accomplishmentis a daily one in early morning fruit and vegetable marketsall over the world.Others see more than a superficial appearance of disorder.Through recorded history and folk memories, we are repeatedlyreminded of the depression of the 1930s in whichmany millions of people all over the world were exiled fromthe system by losing their jobs—a descent toward chaos forthem. In some nations that descent engulfed a third of thepopulation, even if most people in every society continuedto find orderly life, work, and social interchange. One mightfear that it could happen again. Perhaps. But more than ahalf century has gone by without a repetition of such a catastrophe.Societies have greatly improved their knowledgeof how to stabilize the market system through, amongother possibilities, governmental expenditure and managementof the supply of money and credit.Still, like all social institutions large and small, the marketsystem in its normal operations fails us—falters in itscoordination—on some counts. Every few years it fallsinto that abnormality called recession—small depressionsdwarfed by that of the 1930s, yet still damaging. So frequentlydoes it fall into recession that we might as well callthose abnormalities normal. They impose hardship on millionsof people. But neither recessions nor any of the otherdefects of the market system warrant the careless assertionthat the market system produces chaos. In our time thegreatest threat of worldwide disorganization of the market