Can Networks Crowd Out Markets?

Thanks. Yes, this is the argument I would need to counter or incorporate. I start from the assumption that the market could--and necessarily is--dialed up or down in accord with state imperatives, so I want to ask the question: how low could it be dialed down? I want to try to formulate the answer "all the way," but on terms as voluntary as possible so as to frame the market as derogation of power--possibly necessary, possible beneficial, but still a derogation that needs to be accounted for. So, "all the way" is not necessarily a final answer--it's more of a thought experiment to bring out what the features of this more intentional form of cooperation would have to look like. But the way you speak about it here fits what I'm trying to think through: the ruler might set up a market for a certain purpose, or allow for a circumscribed market for certain sectors where it has proved beneficial. Exactly how much calculation must be done in money--can we calculate *that*? What other "variables" are held constant as we do? And, of course, we'd have to talk about monopolies. We need a consistent way of speaking about economics, and I hope what I have here is a step toward it,, even if through some "falsification." I don't want to take anything for granted.

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No, I didn't get that impression--your response was very welcome.

Hopefully, we'll get more people with business knowledge and experience interested in what we're doing and they'll help us out with the specifics. (Maybe you're one of those people,) Or maybe a new journal will come along that's interested in these questions--I thought that might be *American Affairs* for awhile, but they seem to have gotten interested in other things. As a theorist, I'm content to have the question, and to know what kind of a question is for us. That allows for a kind of dialectic with liberal economics, and we'll learn from that. It also provides an opening to address something liberal economic really can't: what would be possible in a well-ordered society, in which adherence to the center is a given, that wouldn't be possible in more centrifugal settings? Social order and de-pathologization must count for something, economically.