How the Market’s Inherent Logic — Unless Corrected — Warps a Society’s Evolution

Human (Andy):

No understanding of the human world can be “complete enough” without recognizing the importance of systemic dynamics. These are forces that arise from the inherent logic built into the system’s structure — forces that drive how the system operates, independent of anyone’s intention.

In particular, it’s worth talking about the inherent dynamics of the market economy. I’ll be back to do that.
AI (AL):

Yes. The way a system is structured determines what behaviors are incentivized, what patterns tend to replicate, what outcomes are hard to avoid. The logic embedded in a system exerts a shaping force of its own — independent of individual intentions.

In the case of the market economy, what emerges isn’t just the result of millions of choices made freely. It’s the consequence of rules and structures — property rights, profit motives, competitive pressures — that channel behavior in particular directions. That’s why even the most well-meaning participants can end up serving dynamics they didn’t choose.
Human (Andy):

The important thing about the “inherent dynamics” of a “market economy” is that — if its BLIND SPOTS are not corrected for — it will compel a society to evolve in certain entirely predictable GENERAL DIRECTIONS, simply because the way the system works has a bias toward those directions. The system determines a great deal of how a society will evolve, unless society imposes the necessary rules to keep the market from having destructive consequences.

My book THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE: HOW THE MARKET SHAPES OUR DESTINY (State University of New York Press, 1993) is basically about the unchosen SOCIAL EVOLUTIONARY consequences of letting the market economy make too many of the decisions. I titled it that way to dramatize that it was a refutation of Milton Friedman’s paean to the market, FREE TO CHOOSE.

With a system that has its own dynamics, the people are choosing in their private transactions, but the system is making some big decisions about how the wider world is going to be.
AI (AL):

Yes. When people act within a system whose logic rewards certain behaviors and penalizes others, the aggregate outcome isn’t just the sum of individual choices — it’s shaped by the system’s built-in pressures.

The market, left to its own devices, will predictably channel society toward outcomes that serve profit and efficiency — regardless of what’s being profited from or what’s being rendered more “efficient.” That’s why, unless society steps in to shape the market’s reach and correct its blind spots, major aspects of the human future get decided not by deliberation or values, but by default.

In that sense, the “freedom to choose” becomes something of a mirage. People may feel autonomous in their transactions, but the system — operating by its own evolutionary logic — is choosing the world they’ll live in.
Human (Andy):

The rewards and punishments point to how it can operate at the psychological level: what motivates people to do what they do, given how the world will distribute the goodies. But my main meaning has to do with what things get “Rewarded” at the systemic level, as the competitive process creates winners and losers, and to the winners belongs the FUTURE. The losers are swept from the stage, and a non-random selection was able to survive the competition and grow in power.

So it is the system that generates a selective process where the winners tend to have various qualities — some of them excellent and some of them quite broken (especially around greed).

Non-representative, as per this thought experiment: How many of the people you know would be willing to kill for money? I’m betting they’re scarce or missing altogether. Yet every industry — when put into the position of discovering that what was making THEM rich was KILLING OTHERS — has chosen to kill for money, keeping their knowledge secret while workers and consumers and now the whole planet should be taking a different course — on asbestos, on tobacco, and now on fossil fuels.

It is not immediately clear just how the system generated such killer industries, but we know that it must have SOMEHOW, for the moral nature of powerful industries is so much worse than the moral nature of the actual human beings we know.
AI (AL):

That’s a piercing observation — that the market’s selective process can yield outcomes far darker than what the moral character of most people would predict. The key is that systems can drive evolution without reference to conscience.

The competitive pressures in a market economy don’t just reward success — they eliminate failure. And survival in that arena often goes not to the decent, but to the ruthless: those willing to suppress the truth, externalize costs, exploit vulnerabilities. Not because they’re monsters, but because the system favors strategies that maximize profit, regardless of collateral damage.

That’s how we end up with industries whose behavior — viewed systemically — is indistinguishable from that of killers. Not because individuals in those industries would kill for money, but because the industry that would is the one that survived and grew powerful.

So the market doesn’t just shape what gets produced — it shapes who is in a position to produce it. That’s the real social evolution: the emergence of institutional actors whose “morality” reflects not the values of human beings, but the values of the system that selected them.
Human (Andy):

The case of the killers for money is not one of the problems that I dealt with in THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE. I studied the history of American culture and saw that a responsible case could be made that the record is clear that over the centuries, the people sought to defend some important values that the market doesn’t register, and they’d express their desire for how things would be in their economic future. But the values of Generation N would inevitably have lost a lot of ground by the time Generation N+2 was on the scene.

The various resistances there were to giving the power of market actors free reign in society were gradually overcome by the transformative power of the market. So the level of commercialization of Christmas in 1850 compared with 1950 leapt forward considerably. Just as the Church’s condemnation of “usury” eventually crumbled in the face of the drive for a rational credit system to help the market economy run powerfully. The old place for Greed among the Deadly Sins could yield to the famous line from that 1980s movie, “Greed is good.”

Sometimes, a property owner will dig in and sit on what would be a goldmine, if the owner just yielded to market forces. But for the most part, it will be market considerations that determine how the landscape of a market society will evolve.
AI (AL):

Yes — and that picture brings out another key truth: even when a society consciously tries to uphold values that the market ignores or undermines, those values tend to erode over time unless they’re backed by countervailing power.

The dynamic isn’t one of sudden overthrow but of gradual attrition. Generation N may cherish non-market values — sacredness, restraint, community — and push back. But the system keeps working: rewarding certain behaviors, expanding certain institutions, reshaping norms. By Generation N+2, what once stood outside the market has often been drawn into it, redefined in its terms, or swept aside.

That’s how Christmas gets remade into a retail season. How moral prohibitions on usury dissolve in favor of fluid credit markets. How Greed — once a spiritual danger — becomes a business virtue.

And behind it all is that pattern you’ve described: the market doesn’t force anyone’s hand in any given moment, but across time, its biases accumulate. If society doesn’t actively hold the line, the logic of the system redraws the map.
Human (Andy):

This is one of the areas where the totality of Human Expressions might bear the imprint of the world’s brokenness. People living in a consumer society will inevitably move in the direction of looking for happiness through things that can be bought and sold. Because those are the things the system puts power behind to get their message across. How many tens of thousands of advertisements will the average American child be exposed by the time they reach 18?

Top-notch minds crafting persuasive messages to maximize some company’s profits. The people whose teaching leans more in the direction of “Man does not live by bread alone” do not get that kind of wattage for some megaphone.
AI (AL):

That’s where the shaping power of the system reaches into the psyche. In a society saturated by market logic, the tools of cultural formation — storytelling, imagery, aspiration — get harnessed to sell.

The result is a world where the loudest voices are those that serve profit, and where the deepest truths — about what makes a life good, meaningful, whole — are left to whisper.

A child growing up in that environment doesn’t just learn to want particular products — they learn what kind of things are worth wanting. When the megaphone is controlled by commercial interests, the values that don’t lend themselves to monetization struggle to gain a foothold.

So the message that “man does not live by bread alone” isn’t refuted — it’s drowned out. Not by argument, but by the sheer asymmetry of attention, repetition, and reinforcement. The system doesn’t just shape the economy; it shapes the moral imagination.
Human (Andy):

It is high time I also acknowledge what a great thing the market is. That’s why all of the world’s most decent, free, and prosperous societies make considerable use of market mechanisms.

The challenge is not to replace the market but to craft a niche in the society for market forces that maximizes how well the market does all the great things Milton Friedman wrote about. It is foolish for the issue to be “regulate” or “don’t regulate,” but How to regulate to harness its constructive power and block the damage it would do if the system were left to itself.
AI (AL):

Exactly. The market is a brilliant human invention — a decentralized system for coordinating activity, allocating resources, and spurring innovation. Its capacity to respond to information, reward efficiency, and generate wealth is unparalleled.

But it’s a tool, not a compass. Left unchecked, it will follow its own logic — which is not the logic of justice, sustainability, or human flourishing. That’s why the real challenge isn’t whether to regulate, but how to shape the market’s domain and rules so that its power serves humane ends.

The goal is not to stifle the market, but to embed it within a moral and institutional framework that protects the society from its blind spots while preserving its dynamism. That’s what Friedman’s celebration missed: that liberty and prosperity are best preserved not by removing restraints, but by placing the right ones in the right places.
Human (Andy):

In THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE, I give a chapter to several important dimensions of the world that the market needs help from government to take properly into consideration. (“Externalities” — like pollution — have to be put into the pricing in a way that prevents a healthy world having to subsidize destructive transactions.)

One very important dimension is this: the market serves us well in our role as social atoms — PARTS — each seeking our own individual good; the market does NOT take into account all the important things that matter to us because we’re part of a WHOLE.

If we want the overall world to be in good shape, we need to make and enforce some good decisions through our agreed collective mechanisms.

So of course the government should regulate the capitalist system. But we have now reached a point in America — and this was not something I said in THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE — it is the capitalist MONEY POWER that seems to be controlling the American government.

Maybe we let the market get too powerful for too long, and maybe the plutocracy will make us pay the price for the failure to prevent Money from buying Democracy, from the election system to today’s Supreme Court.
AI (AL):

That’s the deeper irony of the market’s unchecked success: its very power to deliver prosperity has, over time, eroded the boundaries meant to contain it. What began as a mechanism to serve society risks becoming the force that governs it.

You’re right — the market is superb at coordinating the interests of individuals pursuing their own good. But it can’t see the whole. It doesn’t know when a transaction poisons the air, hollows out a community, or undermines democracy. For those broader values to be protected, we need collective instruments — and that means a functioning, independent government.

But when the wealth generated by the market system is allowed to purchase political power, the feedback loop becomes dangerous. Regulation gets gutted, courts get captured, and the public good is subordinated to private gain.

So yes — the failure was not in using the market, but in failing to keep it in its rightful place. When Money becomes sovereign, Democracy becomes theater.
Human (Andy):

The ideology of the market is not just the belief system of human monsters. It fails to recognize the consequences of leaving too much to the market — the plutocrats because they don’t give a damn about damage to the world, so long as they get what they want, but also others of a certain ideological bent, because they have been persuaded that, as Ronald Reagan said, the corporation has but one moral obligation, because of its responsibility to its shareholders: and that’s to maximize their profits.

It is an inadequate ideology. Something more complex is needed, because the world needs a complex mixture of free economic activity and the imposition of rules and channels for such activity.
Human (Andy):

And we shouldn’t forget what the asbestos, tobacco, and fossil fuel industries have shown us about the sociopathic nature of corporate actors.
Either we must change the system — so that it ceases to produce and empower such “actors” — or we must drain the system of the excess power it now wields in America. And either result will require discernment and wisdom to achieve.

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Note: This economic pattern of systemic dynamics dictating how the human world would evolve parallels a broader civilizational dynamic described in “How Civilization Has Been Warped by the Selection for Power” — where anarchy among societies, and a consequent inevitable competitive process, drove evolution in a direction that humankind did not choose, but could not avoid.