Markets Don’t Work for Everything

My Bloomberg View colleague Tyler Cowen has a running series of blog posts bearing the title “Markets in Everything.” Plenty of other economists and writers have picked up the phrase, and with good reason — it’s evocative of a powerful idea that defined much of Western political economy in the later part of the 20th century. The idea is that markets — systems of property rights with free buying and selling — are the best way to organize a vast array of human interactions.