The Market Experience

The previous chapter's treatment of the way labor markets allocate the costs of improving learning in the workplace and allocate work positions in a stratified society, and how internal markets escape the pressures of the external market, prepares the way for more detailed treatment of the effects of three central aspects of the market: efficiency (the efficiency norm), competition, and the division of labor. We shall see how economic efficiency may actually frustrate social efficiency, and how competition, which we said in the previous chapter favored consumers over workers, is unlikely to become internalized by workers as a trait of competitiveness – because that trait is not rewarded by the market. The division of labor that favors the development of self-esteem (Chapter 10) has somewhat different implications when applied to knowledge – thus dividing workers between those with brawn and those with brains – but these are not the implications Marx thought he saw in the division of labor. Since the markets accelerate the division of labor, we must also ask whether the consequent specialism is a source of narrowed insight and interest depriving workers of a more wholesome “well-roundedness.” I conclude that the consequent specialism does not. The last part of this chapter is devoted to exploring why an economy that gives priority to workplace satisfactions and achievements, that is, a producer economy, is incompatible with market forces.

The efficiency norm

Market constraints on behavior are not self-enforcing; they require the kind of cultural support that makes the principles of the market appear both rational and moral.