Markets are constructed artifacts requiring sustained political maintenance, not spontaneous phenomena.
Evidence
A market, says Melamed, “is more than a bright idea. It takes planning, calculation, arm-twisting, and tenacity to get a market up and going. Even when it’s chugging along, it has to be cranked and pushed.” (Melamed and Tamarkin 1996, p. 295) Even once the Merc’s S&P index futures were launched (on April 21, 1982) the political work of market construction did not end. Financial derivatives exchanges are subject to virtuous and vicious cycles: if trading volumes are high, exchanges are liquid and attractive places to trade, further enhancing volume; if volume starts to slip, liquidity can dry up and exchanges become fatally unattractive. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 773
Categorization
- DEFINE: Explicitly defines the virtuous/vicious liquidity cycle central to how exchanges survive or die — a key mechanism in the performativity account.
- CANDY: “A market is more than a bright idea… it has to be cranked and pushed” is a quotable, tweetable line about market construction.
- DEEPTHINKING: The juxtaposition of Melamed’s crude ‘cranking and pushing’ with the elegant liquidity-cycle mechanism captures the passage from human agency to self-sustaining market structure — the heart of performativity.
- XREF: connects to: Markets are political projects, not natural outcomes of state removal — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 266; Capitalism’s governing order rests on fragile political balances, not inevitability. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 140; Market economies require deliberate political construction, not natural emergence — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 364 (+6 more)
Broader Connections
- The market must be actively constituted by political intervention, not discovered
#corroborates(1.00) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1852 - Markets are human creations amenable to redesign, not natural forces
#corroborates(0.95) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 1237 - The media economy is a political construction, not a natural market
#expands(0.90) — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 62 - Markets can be performatively constructed by agents who are not atomistic homo economicus
#expands(0.85) — Donald MacKenzie & Yuval Millo, Constructing a Market, Performing Theory, 25 - Capitalist logic is a fragile political construction, not an inevitable order.
#corroborates(0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 140 - The social market economy was a political tool, not a closed economic theory.
#exemplifies(0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 554