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Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets, by John McMillan
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Clear, insightful, and nondogmatic, this book gives us a new appreciation for one of our most ubiquitous institutions.
From the wild swings of the stock market to the online auctions of eBay to the unexpected twists of the world's post-Communist economies, markets have suddenly become quite visible. We now have occasion to ask, "What makes these institutions work? How important are they? How can we improve them?"
Taking us on a lively tour of a world we once took for granted, John McMillan offers examples ranging from a camel trading fair in India to the $20 million per day Aalsmeer flower market in the Netherlands to the global trade in AIDS drugs. Eschewing ideology, he shows us that markets are neither magical nor immoral. Rather, they are powerful if imperfect tools, the best we've found for improving our living standards.
A New York Times Notable Book.
- Sales Rank: #284278 in Books
- Brand: imusti
- Published on: 2003-11-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x .90" w x 5.50" l, .67 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 278 pages
- W W Norton Company
Amazon.com Review
John McMillan's Reinventing the Bazaar is an extremely accessible description of markets large and small, as well as an explanation of their underlying mechanisms. An "absolutely free market," he says, is a "free-for-all brawl," while a "real market" is an "ordered brawl." Sprinkling his analysis with hundreds of anecdotes and examples--prison camps, eBay, the American experiment with alcohol prohibition, the Tokyo fish market, and traditional Ghanaian bazaars--and pertinent quotes from the likes of Chekhov, Twain, and Steinbeck, McMillan animates his subject. Why do banks build showcase headquarters? Which "frictions" brake, and which spur, various markets? Is the "invisible hand" attached to a clothed arm? Why are both pro- and antimarket absolutists, in McMillan's view, the economics equivalent of "flat-earthers"? Is there such an animal as a "perfect" market? Reinventing the Bazaar answers these questions, and many more, in an eminently wise, entertaining, and instructive way. --H. O'Billovich
From Publishers Weekly
An economics professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, McMillan views this historical moment as a unique living laboratory for observing how technology, globalization and changing expectations of buyers and sellers have brought changes to everything from the international flower market based in the Netherlands to national economies. The sheer number of ingenious schemes that have surfaced over the last decade has had an intoxicating effect on McMillan; he skips from the 1994 FCC auction of the electromagnetic spectrum for pagers to the hugely popular Internet auction sites and the effects of intellectual property rights on innovation in this anecdotally rich survey of world markets and new trading opportunities. McMillan looks at a wide variety of industries including interstate trucking and fishery management and lays out the elements he regards as necessary for a smoothly operating market. An illuminating chapter comparing the deregulation and privatization experiences of New Zealand, Russia and China will leave readers wishing that McMillan had concentrated on just a few examples to establish in-depth his primary points: that good design of a market is crucial to its success, that a market develops over time by trial and error, and that government plays an indispensable role in providing public goods and acting as rule setter and referee in the best of all market-based worlds. As it is, the book feels scattered, and McMillan's tone is by turns condescending and frustratingly abstruse. Many readers will be disappointed.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Readers looking for a basic primer on how our "market economy" works will find no better treatment than this first book by Stanford University professor McMillan. Taking the long view, he examines how markets in ancient times evolved and shows how countries experimented with markets, some successfully and some not. Not surprisingly, he judges countries like Russia and China with their centralized economies as not being truly market driven, but he lauds them for recent changes. Although he does raise the flag on "free markets" a bit much, he takes a refreshingly commonsense approach to his subject, doesn't talk down to his readers, and refrains from excessive economic jargon. The Internet is praised for breaking down barriers, and he terms the eBay web site "a high-tech flea market." Government deregulation is a good thing, but California, in his opinion, made a mess of it resulting in the energy crisis of last year. The bottom line for McMillan is that "the market system is like democracy. It is the worst form of economy, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time." Recommended for academic and larger public libraries. Richard Drezen, Washington Post/New York City Bureau
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Primer on Market System!
By O. Halabieh
Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:
1- "A definition of a market transaction, then, is an exchange that is voluntary: each party can veto it, and (subject to the rules of the marketplace) each freely agrees to the terms. A market is a forum for carrying out such exchange."
2- "Markets are too important to be left to the ideologues. In fact, markets are the most effective means we have of improving people's well-being. For poor countries they offer the most reliable path away from poverty. For affluent countries they are part of what is needed to sustain their living standards."
3- "The key feature of markets of all kinds is brought home when we look at the growth of new market mechanisms. Benefiting both buyer and seller, any transaction creates value. Buying and selling is therefore a form of creation. Elementary at this point is, its importance cannot be overstated. There are gains from trade, and people are relentless in finding ways to realize them."
4- "Two kinds of market frictions arise from the uneven supply of information. There are search costs: the time, effort, and money spent learning what is available where for how much. And there are evaluation costs, arising from the difficulties buyers have in assessing quality. A successful market has mechanisms that hold down the costs of transacting that come from the dispersion of information."
5- "Well-designed markets have a variety of mechanisms, formal and informal, to ensure there is indeed money in being honest. marketplace confidence rests on rules and customs that give even unscrupulous people reason to keep their word...Contracting rests not only on the courts but also on informal devices based on reputation. Information must flow in reputational incentives are to work."
6- "Some externalities can be corrected by defining and enforcing property rights. In other cases the harmful activity can be taxed. In extreme cases the only solution is to ban it."
7- "A workable platform for markets has five elements: information flows smoothly; people can be trusted to live up to their promises; competition is fostered; property rights are protected but not overprotected; and side effects on third parties are curtailed."
8- "Governments sometimes conspire to undermine markets. Corruption cuts into productivity because firms that fear they will be at the mercy of bribe-takers are reluctant to invest. Price-fixing also cuts into productivity by preventing the price system from doing its job of allocating resources. Constructive government actions are needed...to help the market system work as it is supposed to. But there is a risk that government intervention will be perverted in counterproductive directions."
9- "Well-functioning markets rely on a judicious mix of formal and informal controls. While the government helps to set the rules for the market, so do that market participants. an economy cannot be designed from above. If it were possible to plan the reforms, if would have been possible to plan the economy."
10- "Those on the far left of the political spectrum, who abhor poverty, espouse policies that would entrench it. The fervent proponents of laissez-faire, who esteem market, advocate a system that would trigger their collapse."
11- "The market system is like democracy. It is the worst form of economy, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time. It succeeds because, precisely as in Forster's view of democracy, it admits variety and permits criticism. We should cheer it because it solves some all-but-intractable problems, which have been tackled by none of the alternative forms of economic organization. It generates wealth. It alleviates poverty. But it has its limits. There are things it cannot do. It does not necessarily do even what it is supposed to; it works well only if it is well designed. Two cheers are enough."
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Servicable Look at the Economics of Markets and Market Design
By H. P.
Reinventing the Bazaar was written by the late John McMillan, a professor of economics at Stanford and an expert on government procurement. This is a book about the economics of markets (with a focus on market design), not an economic history, as I believed when I purchased the book.
Prof. McMillan devotes the first half of the book to what he identifies as the five basic components of market design: information flow, enforcement of promises, competition, property rights, and externalities. He devotes the second half of the book to implementation of those five basic components.
Overall, Prof. McMillan does a good job explaining economic concepts in plain English. Reinventing the Bazaar gets into a lot of the "guts" of markets that are typically not covered in basic economics classes. In particular, Prof. McMillan recognizes the importance of law and legal institutions to markets, something economists sometimes gloss over.
Unfortunately, Prof. McMillan has a tendency to make some rather questionable statements. For example, there is a rather blatant error (or omission) in his discussion of the preference of book agents' for sealed-bid auctions over open auctions (which net their clients higher advances). Prof. McMillan identifies the agents' position as "mistaken." But this preference is not due to mistake, it is due to agency costs. The agents are acting in their own self-interest in a scenario in which their interests conflict with those of their clients. Agents reap only a fraction of the benefit of the final bid, but perform the bulk of the extra legwork necessary to run a successful open auction (which also takes longer). This creates the divergence in interests.
Other statements look more like sloppiness than error. If it were true that the conventional wisdom is that "markets cannot exist without private ownership underpinned by the legal system," then the term "black market" would not exist and be in widespread use (Prof. McMillan claims this despite discussing the shadow economy a few chapters later). He states that "street vending has even gone global" as if it were invented in New York City a few decades ago and has not existed for thousands of years.
Inexplicably, Prof. McMillan fails to mention a grave error in U.S. spectrum auctions (which he apparently helped design) that allowed telecom companies to collude and buy spectrum for a fraction of its true value. By not forcing companies to bid only in large increments, the U.S. gave them an avenue to signal each other during the auction. Tim Harford covers this design flaw in chapter 7 of The Undercover Economist.
In his otherwise excellent discussion of tradeable emissions allowances, Prof. McMillan correctly notes that they only work if the total amount of pollution matters more than where it originates, but he fails to note in his implication that local pollution should be handled by government command-and-control action that local pollution is more susceptible to Coasian bargaining than national pollution due to lower transaction costs.
Prof. McMillan argues that government action is needed for effective markets (ordo-liberalism), and that is an important argument to make, but he fails to address its limitations. He recognizes that property rights are expensive to establish, for example, but any discussion of regulation without a discussion of regulatory capture is incomplete. Public choice theory is woefully absent, a fatal flaw for a book so concerned with designing efficient markets.
Reinventing the Bazaar is at its strongest when covering deregulation and privatization. Capitalism is clearly superior to command-and-control direction of the economy, but we have come to learn that even where there is an obviously better alternative, the transition itself can be problematic. Post-Soviet Union Russia is contrasted with China. Russia tried to used command-and-control methods to privatize its economy; China used more decentralized methods. Not surprisingly, China's efforts were more successful. I would remind advocates of deregulation and privatization that they are also government action and subject to the same limitations.
The final chapter puts things into a more political perspective. According to Prof. McMillan, neither free market and anti-market ideologues have an empirical leg to stand on. Where we come down in the middle must be determined by core values but, more importantly, also by the facts. I would add that this is good encouragement to look a little closer at the economic merits of public policy proposals (beyond what sponsoring politicians claim they are).
There are, I think, some fairly serious issues with Reinventing the Bazaar, which is why I gave it only 3 stars, but it is not without merit. It is probably as good a basic survey of economics for laymen as I have found (sadly, a largely disappointing sub-genre). I think it could still be an excellent choice if coupled with a survey of public choice, such as Gordon Tullock's Government Failure, to fill in its deficiencies.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Main stream economy discussed in a way accessible for most
By jukka aakula
The book discusses main stream economy in a way accessible for most. This is well written and entertaining. Discusses many interesting examples.
For me the cases of China and Russia were the most interesting:
1. Markets can work even if the economy is working in a pretty unorthodox ad hoc way. China did not have property laws or private companies but the market reform started in the villages bottom-up. Top-down reforms came later.
2. Markets do not automatically lead to good efficiency. Russia trying the top-down orthodox way proposed by the foreign experts totally unsucceeded.
Markets must develope bottom-up in an evolutionary way like Hayek proposed - but also top-down using market design. The role of the first one is probably more important at least in the beginning.
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