Given this long list of negative social consequences – and much more could have been said along the same lines – it is surprising that most people complain as little as they do. Given the high costs imposed by the continuous widening and deepening of markets, one would expect us to go crazy and society to break apart. Yet on the whole we don't and it doesn't. This fact is enough to make us start doubting the validity of the analysis presented above. If capitalism really is this difficult to live with, one may legitimately ask, why do people on the whole seem fairly content? Why, for example, did the revolution which Marx prophesized never happen? Why are many of us on the contrary reasonably comfortable with a system that has such obvious flaws?

The answer as so often lies hidden in the assumptions. Economists, as we pointed out above, usually feel quite ill at ease when discussing the actual world and prefer instead to talk about the world they have created in their theoretical models. This was the premise also of our discussion. The argument concerned the social consequences that would have materialized as long as everything else remained equal. Yet in the real world, as economists are constantly reminded, nothing ever remains equal and the effects predicted always interact with other, counter-balancing, effects. The same is true of our analysis.