We take markets for granted. Whether it’s your local car boot sale, the supermarket or the most sophisticated financial exchange, markets are so interwoven into everyday life that we rarely stop to think about them. Yet they are ingenious human creations: organized and adapted, regulated and legislated for. They evolve over time, and they create both winners and losers.
In this episode of the podcast, George Miller speaks to Philip Roscoe, professor of management at the University of St Andrews and author of What Are Markets For? They discuss why a shopping trolley is more interesting than it at first appears, how markets of all sorts come to seem natural and inevitable, and what happens when we start to see them as things that people make – and can therefore remake.
Available to listen here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Philip Roscoe is Professor in Management at the University of St Andrews.
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
What Are Markets For? by Philip Roscoe is available for £9.99 on the Bristol University Press website.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
01:24 – Tell me about your career path
05:25 – What lens do you see markets through?
07:52 – What is the significance of the shopping trolley?
10:46 – Why do markets feel inevitable?
15:28 – Was the 1980s a critical turning point for the idea of market thinking?
19:50 – Why is Santa a theme in your book?
26:02 – What is the darker side of markets?
30:44 – What do you think the prospects are for changing away from what we currently have?
38:07 – What is one thing you’d like the listeners to hang on to as an idea?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
George Miller: Hello and welcome to the Transforming Society podcast from Bristol University Press.
My name is George Miller and I’m the editor of What is it for?, a series in which each book tackles a deceptively simple question whose answer is usually anything but.
In this episode, I’m talking to Philip Roscoe about the purpose of markets. From the local car boot sale to the most sophisticated financial markets, the question of what markets are for seems straightforward: they connect buyers with sellers.
But markets do not spring fully formed from nowhere: they are ingenious human creations that are organised and adapted, regulated and legislated for. They evolve over time. They can create winners and losers. And perhaps most remarkable of all, they are so much part of our daily lives that we rarely give them very much thought.
Philip Roscoe has given them a great deal of thought – Philip is professor of management at St Andrews University and his other books include, most recently, How to build a stock exchange, also published by Bristol.
Before he was a professor of management, Philip studied theology and medieval Arabic, so I began our chat by asking him to tell me more about his career path…
Philip Roscoe: Well, that catches me out as an introductory question that I was not at all expecting! I think what’s missing in that little biography, in a sense, which I don’t often draw attention to, is that when I graduated, I got a job as a trainee accountant in one of the big firms, almost by chance, really, which will greatly upset the tens of thousands of graduates who now have to go through multiple algorithmic tests to get anywhere near the place. And after a year, I realized that it wasn’t the thing for me largely because I can’t add.
But when I’d finished the medieval Arabic and I realized that I didn’t want to go further down that line, I then ended up because of the prior experience, I knew how to do a bit of research because of my education. I knew how to read a balance sheet because of the training as an accountant. I ended up working in London as a stocks and shares hack in various roles for, I don’t know, five or six years.
And I became fascinated by a whole set of questions around the stock market particularly and how it worked. And as a result of that, when I decided that I needed to get my life in order and go and do what I should be doing. I started a doctorate at the management school in Lancaster, looking at the organization of financial markets. And I wandered along for a little bit.
In my first year, I read finance literature, I read marketing literature, I read various things. And at the end of your first year of a PhD, you have to do an upgrade where they confirm your status and they read you the riot act about things you’re not doing. And all of this happened.
And the chap I was talking to was a gentleman called Andrew Sayer, who’s a very distinguished Marxist-inspired sociologist of economics. And he said, you need to look at this guy, Michel Callon, and this other guy, Donald McKenzie. They will really help you. And so I did.
And the whole world of my PhD flipped on its head. And so again, it was a question of timing because this was, I don’t know, 2005, probably I had that meeting. Callon’s book came out in 1998.
Donald McKenzie, who’s an absolute superstar sociologist who writes for the LRB, people might be familiar with. He picked up these ideas and taken them into finance in that same sort of period. So this was hot off the press.
This was an exciting period intellectually. And after a couple of years, I went to a conference and I found lots of other people, quite often younger scholars, who had the same sort of trajectory of suddenly hitting these new ideas and thinking they were productive and generative. And that’s the area, the field of market studies that I’ve really worked in ever since.
And that’s what this, so I’ve got my little copy of the book to wave around, that’s what’s motivates this whole book is this particular understanding of how markets work and how they’re organized. So that’s a sort of potted history of how I came from a theology degree to being a student of markets. But funnily enough, and what emerges perhaps a little bit in the book and other things I’ve written, is there is always a kind of theological dimension to some of these ideas.
And there’s always a spectacular narrative and almost literary dimension that’s been picked up by other scholars. And so I’m definitely at that end of the academic spectrum, somewhere between the humanities and the social sciences.
GM: You mentioned that when you were working in finance, you were interested in how it works. And obviously, there are lots of different ways you could approach that question, aren’t there? You could approach it like an anthropologist or an economist or a psychologist. So what would you say is the animating question that you bring to this world or the lens through which you see it? Because it’s obviously one of several that you could have picked.
PR: In a way we start off by kicking against economists a bit, who tend to say the market always fades into the background for economics because it’s all about economic agents and buyers and sellers, and the market’s just this place where incidentally they meet and they exchange things. Nobody really pays much attention – they’re much more interested in preferences and supply and demand and all these kind of things. And then you have various perspectives of anthropology, which have historically drawn attention to all the different kinds of patterns of exchange or reciprocity, gift, or what have you. And you have classic Marxist traditions where the market is this mechanism of exploitation that just covers up all the hidden labour relations that you can’t see. You know, you have your commodity. This is a commodity. This is the thing that buy in the shop, and it suppresses the hours and hours of both our work that went into it.
What my perspective, Callon’s perspective, the field’s perspective does is say, well, okay, we encounter these things which work quite like economists say they should and have quite complicated mechanisms of arrangement and are coordinated in particular ways in which we behave more or less like rational economic agents and all the rest of it. Let’s simply step back and examine not just the social processes, but also the material and the technological processes, the mechanisms of organization through which this comes about. So it is an anthropology, but it’s a technical and material anthropology as well as a social and lived one. And it gives a lot of weight to the physical apparatus and the architectures and the devices of the markets, which is why, as you noted, there’s a shopping trolley on the front of the book.
GM: Obviously, it’s not an accident that there’s a shopping trolley on the front cover because it is a recurring theme or a recurring example of quite a lot of the things that you want to make the reader aware of. So maybe you can just introduce the shopping trolley because it’s something that we all are very familiar with but probably never think about unless it’s got a wonky wheel …
PR: Absolutely. Well, the shopping trolley is two things: on the one hand it’s a sort of synecdoche for the supermarket as a whole. The supermarket is an incredible thing and they’re so everyday and so banal that we take them entirely for granted – you can stroll in and buy almost at any time of day or night almost any food stuff that you want and it’s in supply and it’s stocked and what have you. And it’s of course the front end for these impossibly complicated global supply chains which again like the shopping trolley they only surface when they don’t work otherwise we entirely take them take them for granted.
But also the supermarket itself is this very complex, material, computational mechanism: the way the shelves are arranged, the way the packets are constructed, what’s on the packets and the device of the supermarket trolley that you pick up you push around the aisles of the shop are organized appropriately and that turns out of course to have a history as well.
So Catherine Grand-Clement produced a few years ago, a very engaging history of the shopping trolley, which you would think is, again, it’s a sort of taken for granted thing, but it turns out it’s not. It has a very contested background that is linked to the development of American stores, which is linked to advances in food packaging, transportation, cans, and all of these kinds of things. And then to backpedal, I suppose, cans and packets allow people to choose their own food, handle their own food, but then they have to be able to carry it. So you need a basket, but then the basket is limited. The shopping is limited by the weight of the basket. You don’t want that. So you put wheels on the basket. And then if you have wheels on the basket, then you need a shop that has aisles and you need a certain configuration of tills and so forth. And it’s much more complicated.
And the story goes that the inventor of the shopping trolley, who was, of course, the proprietor of a wire manufacturing company as well as the proprietor of shops had to employ actors to push these trolleys around the aisles because shoppers didn’t necessarily get what they were supposed to do with them. So all of these complicated social technical histories that are just wrapped up and sort of flattened into a device that we would take entirely for granted until we put our token in and we can’t unlock the damn thing or the wheel sticks in a drain or whatever it might be.
GM: Clearly – you mentioned it a couple of times already – there’s this idea of the inevitability of the way that markets present themselves to us. We very readily come to think of them as inevitable. You talked about a transition from the store to the supermarket. And I guess we’re in a transition at the moment from an assistant scanning our shopping to us learning that we can and inevitably through time must do the self-scanning. And it comes to be just the way that we shop …
PR: If we pick up our telephone, we can do the whole thing on a phone or whatever it may be, all these transitions all the time.
GM: So markets are perpetually changing. And yet there’s this curious sense that there’s an inevitability to them, that they are the way they are because that’s the best possible way they could be for us at the present time. And what your book wants to do is expose that to the light and interrogate the why, not just the how.
PR: I think so. I mean, if you take something for granted, you assume it’s entirely natural and it becomes naturalized and then we can’t do anything about it. And there are so many questions around that. I think you could start with the simple assertion that we have made these things and therefore we can change them if we want to.
But maybe we can leave that for a moment and just run backwards a little bit and think about why we’ve got in this situation. And again, it’s so many complicated interlocking stories. But we go in the book right back to Adam Smith. We think about these very old ideas of providence that are still popping up in Smith’s thought. Smith’s trying to understand these new technological transformations, what they mean for society, what they mean for moral philosophy, because Smith was, of course, a distinguished moral philosopher, as well as a keen observer of economic arrangements.
I think what becomes really interesting is in the second half of the 20th century, after the Second World War, where all of a sudden, this becomes a political and an ideological struggle as well as a simple kind of economic and logistical issue. So what happens, of course, after the Second World War is the world fragments into two warring blocks, one of which is organized by a command economy, and the other one is organized by a market economy. And into this gap come, on the side of the market economy, a group of economists who, until maybe the years immediately after the Second World War, had been very, very marginal.
People like Frederick Hayek and von Mises and increasingly Milton Friedman. I think he’s perhaps a little bit younger than those other two. And they have all these ideas about the market as a computer. And it’s a sort of steampunk computer in Hayek’s writing. He talks about entrepreneurs fiddling with dials and gauges and this kind of thing. But the argument is the market is a mechanism of allocating resources without coercion or force.
And we don’t even need to know. We don’t have to have – we can’t have the kind of knowledge that you would need to run an economy. But the market can, because the market is simply a mechanism for collating everybody’s individual local knowledge.
And from there, it’s a small step to go, ha ha, but you see the commissar, the commissar needs all that knowledge, but he can’t have it. And we find Milton Friedman telling us this sort of fairy story about the wonders of the market and getting a pencil into the store for 50 cents and what have you. But it’s not a commissar.
So there’s always this political edge. And of course, we know how the Cold War plays out and this ideological struggle becomes tied to an economic programme that is connected to think tanks and the military industrial complex and what have you. And these economists come in from the margin and by the late 70s, early 80s are really properly well established in the intellectual climate of the day.
And we see politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher coming out with popular versions of the same kind of ideas. So we see the transformation of the market into a political ideological tool that’s absolutely at the centre of the Cold War.
GM: You’ve described that vision of the markets as a kind of optimisation machine. And it’s really interesting this, as you mentioned at the end there, this expansion or extension of this idea, not just to economic affairs, but the thought that if the markets are so effective and efficient and optimal, then that kind of thinking should then be transposed into all sorts of other aspects of our lives. And those of us who are our age or older will remember the rush to privatisation under Thatcher, for example, and the beginning of this infiltration of the private sector into all sorts of aspects which used to be the province or the state. Would you say that was a critical turning point, the 1980s, for this expansion of the idea of market thinking as you described it?
PR: Absolutely. And there’s other things going on as well. There’s the oil shock in the late 1970s. There’s the collapse of the Bretton Woods post-World War II economic arrangements and so forth.
So these are lots of very big shifts in the global economic tectonic plates. But I think at the core of it is this illusion of markets with freedom. So Friedman’s bestselling books called Capitalism and Freedom and Hayek’s tome was The Road to Serfdom.
So these ideas – that if you want to be free people, then you have to have a market society – I think the ideas about computation and the knowledge of the market have faded into the background, and been replaced by broader brush ideas about efficiency and entrepreneurship and so forth. And to be fair, this is always the problem.
You know that ideas catch because there’s a ready seedbed for them. And in the 60s and 70s, for various reasons, we’d seen the growth of enormous global conglomerates. And this was to do with tax, taxation mechanisms. It was to do with the way you could finance companies. It was to do with an understanding that executives had that their job was to make things. You know, being a chief executive was about understanding production.
It didn’t matter what you made. When I was a journo, they were still talking about ‘guns to buns conglomerate Tompkins’, which was always my favourite because they made Hovis bread and Smith and Wesson pistols. It’s making stuff – it’s all the same. But these conglomerates, they were bloated.
The executives feather-bedded themselves. You know, they made use of the facilities and so forth. So there’s a you know a ready soil for ideas that actually what we need is a bit of entrepreneurial efficiency. What we need is value to be returned to shareholders who own the companies and this kind of thing.
And I think that then translates into the public domain. Margaret Thatcher’s rhetoric is very similar, you know, that these state-run services are all completely inefficient. They can’t deliver and what we need is private sector competition and all the rest of it. And I think we’re very clearly coming out of the other side of that program now. But very slowly, I mean, very slowly.
GM: And as you say, it wasn’t that everything was rosy in the days before this thinking took hold. British Rail, again, we’re old enough to remember that British Rail was far from a Rolls Royce service. And yet, what replaced it, you could say it has tried to extract value from the service, but hasn’t actually, in any significant way, really improved the passenger experience. You could think about water. You could think about all sorts of other spheres of life in which this thinking has been applied and has had, at very best, highly mixed results.
PR: And I suppose an enthusiast would say, well, that’s because there’s not proper competition or something like that. But what we see, as you say, is very, very mixed results.
GM: So we’ve been talking about kind of very big themes, macroeconomics and politics and privatization and so on. But you do write in the book, in the third chapter, Philip, about a trip to see Santa in Lapland. And I just wondered if you could tell me why he gets a mention in the book. And more than a mention, he’s kind of like a theme of the third chapter.
PR: Santa’s a theme, yeah. It’s not a trip I’ve ever made, I should stress. My colleague Tia Palo in Edinburgh worked during her PhD as one of Santa’s elves. So in a sense, this is her project. She’s very kindly allowed me to write about. It’s a tremendous example of a market that’s been organized from absolutely nothing apart from a story about a mythical man with a beard and a red coat and so forth. So as I’m sure many people know, you hop on a plane, you fly to remote Lapland, you go and stay in a hotel in Santa’s Village. You get in a sled and you go across the village, through the forests, and you go into a little hut and you’re ushered in by an elf and you meet Sandra and all the rest of it.
And it’s this wonderful magic experience. And I think what we found so interesting was precisely this magic that, again, all the effort and the work, there’s a tremendous amount of work and organization. This has been constructed effectively from nothing over a period of a couple of decades. Problems have been ironed out. The lake didn’t freeze. Santa had to live in a temporary shack at one point. And you can’t use iPads because it’s too cold. So you have to use pen and paper for all the lists and all of these kind of minute things that are entirely invisible to the guests and entirely don’t get in the way of this magical experience, which happens when the fairy tale story meets the fairy tale world that’s been constructed around it. And this is the remarkable thing. Everybody knows it’s fake.
You know, I mean, the grown-ups, I’m sure the kids know, really. The Daily Mail on one occasion, I think, complained about an overweight, drunk, posh English actor playing Santa. They have to get a Santa who, if the flights are coming from Birmingham, can speak to the local kids and who’s up on the latest toy demands and all of these kind of things.
So it’s totally artificial. And yet the visitors are overwhelmed and in tears and writing about their wonderful trips and all the rest of it. So isn’t that a most extraordinary thing?
And I think that’s emblematic. That’s probably why it’s in there of the efforts and labour and, in this case, entrepreneurial imagination that go into producing something that is then entirely backgrounded and how fragile it is as well and how constantly in flux. And, of course, it’s a pop-up market. It goes three or four months and then closes down. It seems to have a hotel now. Maybe it runs a bit longer. But I just think it is an extraordinary example of markets doing what they can do.
GM: I was reading last week about Disneyland Paris, which I guess is the same phenomenon, but on a much bigger scale. And there you start with stories. You start with two-dimensional films on the screen or on your iPad. And then these characters are placed in these settings. And I think Disneyland Paris has had half a billion visitors since it opened about 30 years ago. And I guess one could note this and move on, or one could admire it and say, isn’t this an incredible testament to human creativity and productivity? Or one could be critical of it and say it’s just built of gossamer and fluff. I mean, beyond noting the fact, what kind of lens do you apply to things like this?
PR: I think you can take it two ways. You can look at the technical and material organization of it, which is fascinating. But also you can look at the storytelling aspect of it, the spectacle.
And this is a very important part of markets that they are narrated, they’re storied, they’re told. There’s a wonderful piece, as you mentioned, Disneyland. There’s a wonderful piece. I can’t remember off the top of my head who wrote it. It’s a fair few years old now about people working in Disneyland in America. They’re all mostly students on their summer breaks.
And there’s a very strict hierarchy among the kids working there according to who’s what. So the road sweepers are at the bottom and the princesses are at the top and everyone else is somewhere in between. So they’re inhabiting their character rules even when they’re in the refectory or they’re out of hours or whatever. And one of the lines is that he thought it was quite extraordinary that Snow White turned out to be dating a road sweeper. until eventually he realized that the road sweeper in his other life was in his final year at Harvard Medical School. And he was like, oh, right, now I understand.
GM: That’s a true Disney story, isn’t it? He seemed like a humble woodsman, and he’s revealed to be a prince with a Harvard degree.
PR: Isn’t it? Yeah. And I think that it really nicely shows the porosity between the storytelling of these characters and the actors in the market and so forth, how they inhabit them. And fortunately with Disney, it’s a rather charming and harmless example because I think you could think of many that are less so. But markets are always storied. They’re always narrated. They are performed. They’re talked into being. Even when we go to the supermarket, we know how to behave.
And that’s why, back to the shopping trolley, you need actors to show people how to behave because otherwise they don’t know what this new material thing in the script of buying stuff is or how it works.
GM: And this idea of the market being performed is clearly a running theme in the book. And I guess to kind of extend the metaphor, just as you might have the principals on stage, there’s a lot happening behind the scenes. And as you say, compared to Disneyland, there are other marketplaces which are much darker, which have a much more complex and troubled history. I’m thinking about colonial history where the relationship is much more extractive. So I don’t want to give listeners the impression that we’re only looking at the more benign phenomena or just admiring the invention because there is a much darker side to markets, isn’t there?
PR: Yeah, absolutely. So back to Smith. He’s writing at a time of enormous colonial activity. And one of the things that that colonial activity was doing was exporting new technologies of industrial production, but also quite banal technologies like accounting, ways of keeping books, understandings of how market exchange should be conducted, understandings of what work is for. And a lot of the work of colonialism was exactly that. It was an economic labour of making people somewhere else into economically productive, taxable subjects at enormous psychological, political cost of them.
We see a very nice little kind of exhibit of that from Pierre Bourdieu’s early work, which pops up in the book. He’s, in his younger days, an anthropologist working in Algeria, and he encounters a tribe of mountain folk who basically are not a market society. They regard market relations as sites of hostile interaction and distrust and whatever.
You only go to the market when you absolutely have to. They regard work as a social glue that holds the village together and again is shared and done as necessary and is not a mechanism of production for its own sake. And due to the colonial practices of the French at the time, these people have been forcibly moved into the cities or aspects of the cities have been forcibly moved into the mountains.
And so he finds these tribesfolk in the process of adjusting to a new mode of economic organization, and it’s entirely traumatic for them. And you can imagine it would have been exactly the same for people in 18th century India or what have you. And the market becomes a mechanism, almost a sort of subterfuge.
Managers, for a better word, of the East India Company deliberately misunderstanding the existing economic relations in India so they could take advantage of treating things like contracts when they weren’t really contracts and all of these ideas. So from the very beginning, the modern notion of the market is entangled with this spread of ideas. And I think we can see it very clearly in modernity in that same period, 80s and afterwards, because, of course, the Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War ended. You have Francis Fukuyama writing his triumphalist, The End of History. We’re all going to be democratic market society. There’s nowhere else to go.
We’re going to live happily forever after and so forth. It’s very sort of triumphalist ideas. And this opens up the world to globalization and what we tend to think of as free trade. We have free trade, but we have these long supply chains at the other end of which are often very unfree conditions. You know, we know that a lot of our clothing is produced in exploitative conditions, in economic free zones, in parts of the world where labour standards are much lower, environmental standards are much lower. It’s very hard for firms, in all fairness to firms, it’s very hard for firms to control those kinds of things across the supply chains.
And there is a considerable amount of coercion that’s taking place in order to keep these supply chains open. I mean, in a sense, the current fighting around the Gulf of Hormuz is exactly an example of this kind of thing. This is a tract of water that needs to be accessible for free trade to work.
Well, clearly, this bit of it is not very free at all. There’s an awful lot of stuff going on there.
GM: It struck me that another significant consequence of globalization is that hyperproduction becomes possible. Commodities produce fast scale, cheap prices, overconsumption, you know, fuelling this overheating engine, which is overheating the planet. So, again, markets are not innocent.
There is a moral and practical dimension to the behaviour of markets and the behaviour of us within markets. Absolutely, there is. That background that, you know, we can’t necessarily go on behaving the way we’ve behaved in the past couple of centuries and the next couple of centuries, makes me wonder about what you feel about the reform of markets. Clearly, there are dysfunctions, clearly there are problems and inequities built into the way we do it at the moment. What do you think the prospects are for changing, for transitioning? We’re not going to suddenly overnight switch our whole way of doing things. But what do you think that the prospects and the levers are for transitioning from what we have at the moment? Our extractive, hyper-consumptive economies can’t go on the way they have behaved in the last 40 years, for the next 40 years?
PR: No. The problem is, I think, markets are moral things, but all markets are moral things in some shape or form. Actors tend to be morally committed to the things that they are doing in markets, even if those things are immoral, if that makes sense. I mean, you know, the Andrew Tates of this world, they have a project, horrible, horrible people, but nonetheless, they have.
And so the markets that form around those sets of activities are dysfunctional, toxic, what have you. But they’re morally freighted in a negative kind of way. So I think the issue is not so much with the market, because the market in the end is a mechanism for getting things to people and coordinating the desires of individuals and the supply of goods.
And it’s extremely effective of that. Anthropology sets out the alternatives, which are redistribution and reciprocity. And there are places for those. But I still have no desire to live in a society that is entirely redistributive. That doesn’t sound especially good to me. It’s a way you could see history going. And it’s a pretty unpleasant way, actually. I think it’s something that might be potentially connected with scarcity and conflict and all of those ideas. So despite being critical of the history of markets and the operation of markets as they stand, I still remain quite committed to the possibilities of markets as a means of delivering new kinds of organisation and social good.
What we do see, though, is that within the constraints of the markets of global high capital, this is not really very possible. And there’s quite a lot of emerging research along that line, which is quite disappointing. So my colleague Susie Geiger has done a lot of work on global pharma, for example.
And there are things like patent pools and what have you. But these really come in as mechanisms for keeping the status quo in place. And that is the problem, of course, is that the people who are at the top of the economic and political tree are the ones who benefit from the status quo and who would desire to keep it in place.
So I guess if we’re reforming, what we need is a wholesale change in the sensibilities and desires of the participants of markets, which is precisely the thing that markets cannot deliver. Lots of things can do that. Education or culture or politics or what have you, but not markets, because in that sense, they are mirrors rather than engines.
GM: And when it’s the only game in town, then where do you go? So a younger generation might be very inclined to turn away from some of the behaviours that markets impose upon us. But as you say, while they don’t have any power, it’s difficult to see how the game changes.
PR: Or it may well be that younger generations are very keen to change things, but increasingly only see the options available to them through the lens of contemporary market arrangements, which is something that I see as a teacher in a business school a lot. Students, they’re young, they’re idealistic, they want to change things and all the rest of it. But the way they think is shaped by this worldview.
So we have this idea of technological fixes. We have the idea of entrepreneurship and innovations around that. And we have ideas as well that sensible consumption can somehow change the world.
And I’m not necessarily sure. I’m sure it can help, but I’m not sure that it is in and of itself enough. And these are ideas I think that we’ve inherited from a previous generation of entrepreneurs and thinkers. If I have to ever read another Patagonia case study, I will absolutely blow a gasket for that reason.
GM: I mean, you mentioned technological fixes. And you’ve talked about how markets are about human performances, but we are on the brink of a brave new world in which the human is probably going to take a back seat, aren’t we?
PR: Well, I don’t know. I mean, genuinely, I don’t know. But the AI thing I find particularly distressing because it is clearly a moment of hype. It’s a moment of massive environmental destruction.
These things are hungry, they’re thirsty, it’s not clear what the business case is, it’s not clear how they’re going to save the world if possible. I mean, I tend to be very sceptical about these things and the possibilities of them. Having now lived through two, three major stock market booms and bubbles, this is clearly another one.
I don’t know. To my mind, it’s a very retrograde step. the whole circus around AI. And it is absolutely the peak of spectacle. Oh, we’re going to build colonies on Mars. We’re going to have a million satellites doing AI circling the Earth or what have you.
We’re going to have things floating at sea. We’re going to have general intelligence and what have you. And this is exactly the kind of pernicious storytelling to me that is going to make it very, very hard to think about markets differently.
GM: Philip, just to round off today, if there was one lens or one tool that you would like the reader to be left with after reading your book, or one sort of insight that you think, you know, this is the thing, you know, when they go out into the world and back into the world of markets and behaviour that they may have taken as inevitable, is there one thing that you’d like them just to hang on to as an idea or as a way of just interrogating some of the things.
PR: Just to think about the work involved in the constant effort, the idea that markets are always being made and remade. You know, it’s not even that they’re not natural, but they had to be made once, but they’re constantly being reproduced by all of our actions, by all of the stuff that’s in them and what have you. And they are, on that account, entirely fragile in some ways, and also entirely malleable, totally, totally malleable. And I think if you think about these things, as opposed to being natural, concrete entities as being things that we just do over and over again, as being people in a market society in every single regard. That’s quite a liberating understanding, I think.