Edition 011: The Market as a Design Choice

When you fill your gas tank, buy groceries, look for a job, or scroll through your phone, you are participating in markets. We are all told that markets are efficient — they match buyers and sellers, set prices, and allocate resources. “The invisible hand.” The system working as designed.

What we are not told is that the system was built on fictions. Not lies, exactly. Fictions. Things the system treats as true because it needs them to be true, even though they are not. The kind of fiction that becomes so embedded in daily life that questioning it sounds strange, even naive.

The market is a design choice. It was built by people, for purposes, under conditions, and it can be built differently. The reason this is hard to see is that the design has been in place long enough to look like the weather — something that just happens, that no one chooses, and that no one is responsible for. But the weather is not a fair comparison because the weather is not built. The market is.

We have already met one of these design choices. The corporation, the legal person that is not a person, the institution that exists on paper and nowhere else, is a design choice that organizes enormous power and calls it natural.[1] It is not the only one.

And the remarkable thing is that fictions invented centuries ago now dictate the conditions of daily life for billions of people who have never heard of them and would never have agreed to them. “The invisible hand” was always a metaphor, but it became a justification for deregulation, for dismantling protections, and for leaving the market to decide questions that the market was never equipped to answer. [2]‍ ‍

These fictions are not ancient mysteries. They are design choices that were made by people for certain purposes. And they can be made differently. But the choices that we are living with now have consequences that fall, with remarkable consistency, on the same people.

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Karl Polanyi, an economic historian writing in 1944 as the world was still sorting out what had caused the Depression and the wars that followed it, identified three things the market treats as ordinary products that are not products at all:[3] land, labor, and money. He called them “fictitious commodities” and explained treating these things like products that follow market rules produces real consequences for real people.

Land: The first fictitious commodity is land. Land was here before any of us. It doesn’t truly belong to anyone. And yet the market treats it as a product — something to be bought, subdivided, developed, extracted from, and sold. The moment you accept that fiction, you begin transferring the value of land from the people living on it to the people who own it. That transfer is not a law of nature. It is a choice that comes at a cost to both human beings and the natural environment. Centuries of enclosure, displacement, skyrocketing rents, and communities hollowed out by the growing inequality and speculative excess. Every time you look at a neighborhood that used to be affordable and is no longer, you are seeing the consequences of that fiction playing out in real time.

Labor: The second fictitious commodity is labor. Labor is human activity. It’s your time. The hours of your life that you exchange for a paycheck. Your time is the most irreplaceable thing you have. And yet the market treats it as a product — an input to be priced, optimized, and discarded when efficiency demands it. Wage is not a reflection of what a human being is worth, the value of that person’s time, or even what that person can produce. It is the minimum the market can get away with giving you, depending on how desperate you are. The less you know about the market, the less you get paid. The more desperate you are, the worse your terms. The fiction that labor is a product — that it follows the same rules as corn or steel — is what makes that feel inevitable.

Money: The third fictitious commodity is money. Money feels like the most obviously real thing in daily life — you either have it or you do not — but money itself is a fiction. It is a number on a screen. A piece of paper. A social agreement that this token represents value, backed by the authority of a government or a bank. Money is created by institutions — by banks when they make loans, by governments when they spend — and the fiction that it is a scarce natural resource, with its own immutable laws, hands enormous power to the people who control its creation.[4] When interest rates rise and you cannot afford your mortgage, that is a decision made by people operating within a fiction about what money is.

Polanyi’s argument was that pretending these three things are ordinary products — treating them as though they follow the same rules as things that were manufactured for sale — destabilizes the communities that depend on them. It produces winners and losers that are not random. The winners are consistently the people who own the land, control the labor, and create the money. The losers are consistently the people who live on the land, sell the labor, and need the money. The fiction serves the transaction. The consequences fall on the people.

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Polanyi named three. We are living inside a fourth. That’s where we go next.

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‍[1]See Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 573 U.S. 682 (2014) (describing corporate personhood as “a familiar legal fiction” whose purpose “is to provide protection for human beings”; holding that closely held for-profit corporations are “persons” entitled to assert religious-exercise claims under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act).

[2]See Kennedy, Gavin. “Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand: From Metaphor to Myth,” Econ Journal Watch, May 2009. https://econjwatch.org/articles/adam-smith-and-the-invisible-hand-from-metaphor-to-myth. Accessed 14 May 2026 (arguing the “Invisible Hand” metaphor was minor in Adam Smith's work, but was elevated to doctrinal status by 20th-century economists).

[3]See Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Farrar & Rinehart, 1944.

[4] See Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail (2021); see also Ray Dalio, Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises (2018).