The Market

By (author) Prof. Matthew Watson

Publication date:

31 December 2017

Publisher

Agenda Publishing

Dimensions:

234x156mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781911116608

We have become accustomed to economists and politicians talking about “market forces” as if they are immutable laws of the universe. But what exactly is “the market”? Originally an abstract idea from economic theory – the locus of supply and demand – it has come to inform the way we speak about our relationship to the economic system as a whole.

Matthew Watson unpacks the concept to ask what does it really mean to allow ourselves to submit to market forces. And does economic theory really provide insights into the market institutions that shape our everyday life? In tackling these questions, the book provides a major contribution to a deeper appreciation of the dominant economic language of our time, challenging the idea that we can simply defer to the “logic of the market”.

1. Introduction
2. The market concept in triplicate
3. Symmetrical moral relationships: Adam Smith's impartial spectator construct
4. Demand and supply in partial equilibrium: the Marshallian cross diagram
5. Vectors of market-clearing prices: the Walrasian auctioneer
6. The political rhetoric of "the market"
7. Conclusion

Watson has provided a history of the economic ideas that form the basis of modern economics, brilliantly explaining where many of the economic laws and concepts central to the idea of the market originated . . . there are very few texts on the market that are as good as this.