Three Essays on the Culture of Markets and Peace

Michael R. Romero

Advisor: Virgil Storr, PhD, Department of Economics

Committee Members: Peter J. Boettke, Christopher J. Coyne

Online Location, Online
April 05, 2023, 12:00 PM to 02:00 PM

Abstract:

What enables us to peacefully live with one another? This dissertation studies how the market is a space for mutual understanding, social coordination, and peace. The essays explore insights from mainline political economy and the Austrian economic tradition to better understand how our cultural environments shape the emergence of peaceful societies.

The first chapter, “Economic Calculation and Interpretation,” examines how entrepreneurs understand their worlds and make decisions with the aid of interpretive devices, technologies, or instruments that mediate meaning. Entrepreneurs must cope with uncertainty in attempting to mutually orient their expectations and plans with others in the market. Prices provide a useful means of orientation when used to calculate the expected and realized profitability of alternative courses of action. Although a functionalist account of rational calculation is useful for demonstrating the impossibility of rational calculation in the absence of several property, such accounts often ignore the importance of interpretation as entrepreneurs determine the meaning of cost estimates and market prices, and calculate the expected and realized profitability of their actions. We offer an approach to understanding entrepreneurship that highlights the critical role that interpretation plays in economic calculation. Because an economic signal, such as a profit, does not unambiguously signify which course of action to take, its meaning must be interpreted. Entrepreneurs rely on instruments of interpretation to understand ambiguous signals.

The second chapter “Entrepreneurial Pathways to Peacemaking,” examines why socially embedded entrepreneurs are more attuned to the unique problems and circumstances that stand in the way of peace. Violent conflict is a global phenomenon with devastating costs to individuals and their communities. Government experts and policymakers have responded with efforts to reduce violence and make peace. Such efforts are often implemented from the top-down, however, and are consequently limited in their peacemaking capacities. Top-down peacemaking is limited because it is typically done by community outsiders who simply lack the knowledge and capabilities to systematically plan and make peace in diverse societies throughout the world. We discuss a bottom-up alternative to peacemaking grounded in entrepreneurship. We argue that entrepreneurs make peace by (a) offering individuals a peaceful means to acquire the things they desire, (b) establishing commercial links across (social and geographic) distances, and, in so doing, (c) helping to cultivate habits of peacefulness.

The last chapter, “The Market as a Space for Building a Peaceful Society,” explores the spaces and media of the market that enable us to practice habits which build peaceful societies. Social life can take on a variety of forms – some violent, others peaceful. One type of social arrangement that is especially conducive to peace are friendships, that is, relationships based on mutual trust and dependence. The market is one important but often neglected space where we can practice habits of peacefulness and develop friendships. Markets are social spaces where peaceful societies are built. Although the market is indeed a space for the exchange of property, it is also a local, national, and international space for sociality and extraeconomic conversation that crosses narrow friendship lines. Markets also enable the production and dissemination of media that allow us to sympathize with geographically and socially distant others. Through our participation in markets and our use of market-produced media, we participate in the moral strivings of both our neighbors and folks far flung, and we connect with people we might otherwise have no occasion to know.