“The Market as a God”
The link above is to an article I read recently for my History of Economic Thought Course. The paper is written by a Harvard University Divinity professor, and I really enjoyed the article and thought you guys might, too. If you want to read it before you read the stuff I have to say about it, that might be a good idea.
Cox is very clever in this text, making a lot of interesting analogies and seemingly one general, important statement. Essentially, he discusses how God in the religious world is similar to “the market” in the realm of economics. He does this through the analysis of similarities between the omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent aspects of both the market and God.
This article has interesting insights into the power that we can and have given the market as knowing what’s best and as the end-all to any discussions about how economies should be approached. The market is not THE answer to all societal framework issues, and we shouldn’t let the market necessarily pervade every aspect of our lives. Nor should we openly disregard or oppress those believing in different systems simply because they’re stupid to ignore or think differently about the almighty market!
The general point of the article, I believe, is this. Don’t simply accept everything that our open market brings about, and don’t grasp it as the perfection of economics that no longer needs to be questioned. I’m not saying that it isn’t the best system practically that we have put in place. But it isn’t infallible. The market, as Cox mentions, may be going in directions we shouldn’t go…like trying to sell a whole village, as was mentioned in the text.
Random comments
This text would make my econ professor a high priest and me interested in potentially being one of those people looking at insights as an intermediary!(p.4).
“The market wills it! It is the market’s will!”
Go say some Hail Friedmans.
I Can’t Believe It
On Monday I had the opportunity to see a Nuggets vs. Bobcats game in the Pesi Center in Denver, CO. I was out there with some roommates to go skiing and see my bro (I’ll put up some pics pretty soon), and decided it’d be fun to see another NBA stadium. I didn’t really expect anything spectacular or even a good game, but we definitely got one. Though the Nuggets ended up losing, it was close all the way to the end and was a great show.
The thing that surprised me was the play of Allen Iverson. He is, by far, the best basketball player I’ve ever seen…at least that night… Basically, he PLAYED HARD the entire game, which surprised me, and had some incredible assists and steals. Iverson also showed the most passion and excitement out of anyone on the floor. He put up 31 points, 8 assists and 4 steals that game and was anticipating everything that was happening. He was incredible…not to mention about 5 inches shorter than the rest of of the players. Apparently he knows how to turn it on even if he doesn’t practice hard all the time. Nathan, especially, should go see this man play.
