Patterns, Prices, and Powers: Hussain on Market Governance

I argue that Waheed Hussain’s critique of advanced market economies would be strengthened if, rather than emphasizing how markets draw us into particular patterns of activity in a “judgment-bypassing” way, through changes in prices and wages, he focused more on an idea that he explores in the first two chapters of Living with the Invisible Hand : the need to justify the specific institutional powers that an advanced market economy creates. I examine how this suggestion relates to two of Hussain’s central claims: that markets are mechanisms of decentralized social governance , and that they pose a distinct threat to our freedom.