Is the Market a Test of Truth and Beauty?

ȁȄȃ Partʺ: Economics

Something may well be said for “schools,” which can encourage a

researcher with the prospect of a sympathetic audience. But a school influ-

ential enough to dominate what are considered to be success indicators can

have a baneful influence, inhibiting independent thought.

ŠŔő řōŞŗőŠ ōŚōŘśœť

Sometimes second-handers try to justify their stance by invoking the free
market in goods and services. Once, when the board of directors of the
Southern Economic Association was discussing whether to nominate a
particular economist for some position or other, a member whom I’ll iden-
tify only as “TS” said in effect: “It doesn’t matter what we here think of his
work; let the market decide.” TS went on to name the journals that had
printed the candidate’s work. At least two things were wrong with this
appeal to “the market.” First, the ultimate consumer, the reader of aca-
demic journals—or, more exactly, the subscriber—has an influence more
attenuated and more subject to manipulation by others than the influence
of the consumer of ordinary consumer goods and services. Editors and
referees have reason and scope for heeding fads and cliquish and personal
considerations. Ļey are not risking their own money. Subscribers face tie-
in sales (which include association memberships and the supposed pres-
tige of subscribing) and have reason, anyway, to learn about fads, whether
they like them or not. It is harder in the supposed academic market than
in the real market for customers to know whether they got what they
paid for.
Second, since when was the market, even the actual business market,
supposed to be the arbiter of excellence in literature, art, music, science,
or scholarship? Since when does it decide truth and beauty? Ļe case for
the free market is something quite other than that it constitutes the very
criterion of what should be admired, and it ill serves the cause of a free
society to misrepresent the case for the market.
Finally, TS’s position is the very prototype of the second-handism diag-
nosed by Ayn Rand. Misbehavior in the “marketplace” for ideas is worse
than in the marketplace of goods, suggests W.W. Bartley III, because few
penalties against offenders are readily enforceable, while “whistle-blowers”
are severely punished (ȀȈȈǿ, chaps.ȅandȆ; the analogy between the aca-
demic and business markets is further dissected in MirowskyȀȈȈȁ, pp.ȁȂȈ,
ȁȃȆ, and MayerȀȈȈȂ, pp.Ȁǿff.,ȇȃ).