What the Market Cannot Say
What the price tag teaches and what it cannot — written between Polanyi and the supermarket aisle.
A sample essay — placeholder content to demonstrate the system. Replace or delete me.
There is a small daily ceremony in which we are told the worth of things. It happens at the till. A number appears, and the number settles the matter: this is what the tin of tomatoes is, this is what an hour of your labour is, this is what the field outside the town will fetch. Price is a remarkable language. It can compare a violin to a sack of cement, an afternoon to a kilowatt, and arrive at an answer in seconds. No other human institution translates so much, so fast, into a single unit everyone can read. The temptation, having met such fluency, is to believe it can say everything.
The Language That Cannot Decline a Noun
It cannot. Price is fluent but it has a tiny vocabulary; it knows only “more” and “less.” Ask it whether a thing is sacred and it will tell you what the sacred thing costs. Ask it whether a forest should exist and it will quote you the timber. The language of price is incapable of the subjunctive, the conditional, the vocative — all the moods in which human beings do their most important valuing.
Karl Polanyi gave us the sharpest name for the problem. Some of the things we price, he argued, are fictitious commodities — land, labour, and money — things that were never produced for sale and yet are made to wear the costume of merchandise. Treat a human life as a commodity and you have not described it; you have disfigured it. The market does not lie about these things so much as it is constitutionally unable to tell the truth about them.
A price is an answer so confident that we forget it was only ever responding to the questions the market happened to know how to ask.
What Gets Lost in the Translation
Every translation drops something, and the translation into price drops a great deal. It drops everything that cannot be owned, exchanged, or withheld. It drops the value a thing has to someone as opposed to its value for exchange. It drops the future, mostly, and the dead entirely, and anyone too poor to register a preference with their wallet.
A short inventory of what the price tag is silent about:
- the worth of a thing to a person who could never afford it;
- harms that fall on people not party to the sale;
- everything we would refuse to sell at any number, and are insulted to be offered a number for;
- the slow goods — trust, ecology, a quiet street — that take decades to make and a season to ruin.
None of this is an argument against markets, which remain the least bad way we have found to coordinate the production of tomato tins. It is an argument against the fluency, against mistaking a language’s confidence for its completeness. The market is a brilliant narrow instrument that speaks one dialect very well and has persuaded us it speaks them all. Those interested in the original argument can begin with Polanyi’s account of the great transformation, which reads, eighty years on, less like history than like the morning news.
The wise relationship to price, then, is the one we have to a useful but limited friend: grateful for what it can tell us, and careful never to let it speak for the things about which it knows nothing at all.