The market economy is the central institution of the modern world, affecting the nature and quality of human life more than any other. Consequently, it is the internal structures of the market that draw our attention in the search to understand how human well-being is produced and distributed. This in turn takes us to the essential, and in large measure, defining features of the capitalist economy, which we have already had ample occasion to see: economic activity depends on an inherent asymmetry in power between two classes of persons, one of which depends for its livelihood on the sale of its labor power as a commodity, and another who purchases that commodity in order to so profit by. To be sure, the latter class relies on the labor of the former in order to generate the riches it enjoys, but it remains in a superior position because its very ownership over the capital resources that allow production ensure that it itself need not engage in wage or salary labor in order to survive or flourish.

To say that capital enjoys an asymmetrical power relationship with the wage and salary workers it hopes to profit by is not, of course, to say that workers are entirely powerless. Indeed, the theoretical and practical integrity of the market system requires that workers cannot be compelled to work in the way that serfs, slaves, or indentured servants are. Instead, workers and employers must negotiate the wages and other terms of work, through contracts that are enforceable by law. That employers enjoy a natural advantage in the negotiation of the terms of employment by no means suggests that such terms are anything other than the process of a genuine negotiation. The “struggle” between worker and employer, each of whom wishes to maximize his or her position relative to that of the other, then, takes places first and foremost in this process of negotiation, in which not only wages and benefits but also the conditions, hours, and other rules of work are determined. If so, it is natural to look to such details of the labor market itself as a principal aspect of people's lives, and thus, potentially, of the quality of their lives.