Commerce is beautiful.

• Author: Osborne, Evan
• Position: Essay

In Soviet times, all this was a chaotic mess. In contrast, you'd fly over Western Europe and see miles of perfectly cultivated land.... Now Georgia is the same. It's beautiful to look at. That's the aesthetic look of the free market.

--Georgia prime minister Mikheil Saakashvili, qtd. in Melik Kaylan, "Georgia on His Mind" (2007)

In 1975, a biology professor named Herbert Boyer received an unsolicited phone call from a venture capitalist named Robert Swanson. In conjunction with another biologist, Stanley Cohen, Boyer had already figured out a way to alter the DNA in bacterial cells, potentially turning each cell into a biochemical factory. Swanson alerted Boyer to a possibility that Boyer had not appreciated--the idea that such modified bacteria might be used to produce medicines profitably. In 1976, the two men formed the Genentech Corporation. Soon afterward, the firm's employees figured out how to bioengineer such hormones as human insulin, which was a significant improvement over its animal-derived predecessors. By the mid-1980s, this product and human growth hormone had become commercially feasible to market to patients, a pair of important medical breakthroughs.

Men such as Boyer and to some extent Swanson benefit from a heroic narrative commonly attached to scientific achievement, but significantly less so to entrepreneurial achievement. Scientists who accomplish great things are among the world's most respected individuals in cultures all over the world. Admiration for the creative entrepreneur is not unknown, although it is far from universal because the extent to which entrepreneurship is seen in the culture as a socially useful activity differs from country to country (Thomas and Mueller 2000). The ordinary act of buying and selling, however, in contrast to entrepreneurial genius, is seldom seen as an especially ennobling human activity.

This view is a mistake. That ventures such as Genentech are risky and that they change what is possible for humanity are well-known facts. What is seldom appreciated is that successfully reconciling the interests of and coordinating scientists, financiers, doctors, patients, and other parties are complex and subtle human achievements. They resemble other acts of creation and coordination that we admire as the highest forms of such achievement--for example, the writing or performance of great music and the creation of great paintings. The highest praise for such works of art is that they are beautiful, and I argue here that commerce, too, should be seen as an act of human creativity and expression, rather than a purely utilitarian act. Like other artistic work that is created, displayed, performed, and enjoyed, commerce can be done well or badly. When it is done successfully, the complexity, coordination, and order present within it are quite simply as beautiful as other more traditional artistic activities. Wal-Mart's ability to meet a desperate human need in the wake of a powerful hurricane is not simply an act to be praised for its practical virtues, but to be admired for the difficulty and subtlety of anticipating what people are likely to need and making sure it is there when they need it, even though the firm has at its disposal only the power to persuade in the marketplace. Wal-Mart's achievements in such circumstances are not simply profoundly useful; they are sublime, too.

Understanding commerce as more than an act of efficiency or of self-interest and as potentially beautiful is not only plausible according to many of the traditional understandings of beauty, but suggests that we see producers' role in society in a new, more favorable light. To make the case for the beauty of commerce, I invoke two philosophical conceptions of beauty and demonstrate why commerce clearly qualifies as an aesthetic achievement in both of them. I then take up one objection from the theory of beauty that potentially disqualifies commerce as beautiful. I finally consider the implications if commerce is seen as expressive and potentially beautiful, rather than as merely efficient.

Beauty as an Ideal--Classical Notions of Beauty

Historically, commerce has not been seen as beautiful and has frequently been depicted in literature and philosophy as occupying the lower rungs of the ladder of human achievement, a necessary evil at best. In The Republic, Plato describes the erosion of the ideal aristocracy as beginning with discord between those who love culture and the other higher things in life, on one hand, and the naturally lower classes drawn to "money-making and the acquisition of land and houses and silver and gold," on the other (547b, Plato 2005, 291 ). This stage of government, the timocracy, is the beginning of the decay of the good society and the first step on the slide toward tyranny. Indeed, part of what makes Plato's good society good is its reliance on commonly owned property in lieu of individual property rights. In the timocracy, the extension of private property and the conversion of the higher class's servants from friends into slaves go hand in hand as the republic erodes. Love of money crowds out love of virtue, so timocracy becomes oligarchy and ultimately despotism.

Plato also created the notion of perfect forms, the true knowledge and artistic beauty toward which humans, particularly philosophers, should strive. In his famous Parable of the Cave in The Republic, there is a hierarchy of perception from the least (shadows on the wall) to the most accurate and thorough. As Socrates says in Plato's allegory, "in the world of knowledge the idea of the good is the limit of what can be seen, and it can barely be seen; but, when seen, we cannot help concluding that it is in every case the source of all that is right and beautiful, in the visible world giving birth to its light and its master, and in the intelligible world, as master, providing truth and mind" (517b, Plato 2005, 254). It is the philosopher's goal, through study and introspection, to see the world as it truly is rather than as it is perceived on the surface. This concept of objective forms, which the great majority of humans who are not philosophers may only approximate through their senses, is key to Plato's theory of beauty. Beauty in this conception is not only unknowable to most, but is an ideal form, and the job of artists in their work is to approximate it as closely as possible. In particular, perfect beauty is characterized by such features as proportion, symmetry, and harmony.

Two features of beauty can thus be derived from the Platonic conception. First, beauty is objective rather than a concept dependent on a particular observer's sentiments about or judgment of a creative work (an idea that would be disputed much later). Second, beauty is perfection toward which artists, poets, and so on must strive in their creative activity. This notion of beauty was dominant for centuries after classical Greece. In the early centuries of the Christian era, much of the beauty-as-perfection idea came to be theological, with beauty something to strive for so as to approximate the divine and to please God, who was perfect beauty and in whose creation beauty could be glimpsed. Although the source of beauty was now explicitly divine, the notion of a pure, perfect, aesthetic unity remained in church scholars' thinking about beauty. For St. Augustine, beauty consisted of number, form, unity, and order, and was an innate characteristic of an object, with the observer's pleasure deriving from beauty's existence in the object. Beauty was Godly perfection, just as it had been perfection without monotheism in Greece. In the Renaissance, the scholar of poetry Viperano extended this argument to written creation when he argued that the beautiful poem was perfect and the perfect poem beautiful (Tatarkiewicz 1972).

Neoclassical economic theory provides a similar conception of commerce. Figure 1 is the familiar depiction of long-run equilibrium in the model of perfect competition. Although the idea of perfect competition was probably introduced by Antoine Cournot in Researches into Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth in 1838 (1963) and refined by Alfred Marshall in Principles of Economics in 1920, the figure itself was created by Joan Robinson in The Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933), with the assistance of analysis by Roy Harrod (1930, 1931). It is a representation of perfection--of the one outcome for which the price asked for and received by sellers is equivalent to both their average and marginal cost. The first equality leads to the elimination of profits, and the second maximizes social welfare. These features are both objective and, in the classical sense, a perfect form. Perfectly competitive equilibrium is also a Platonic ideal in the sense that it is the only stable outcome--that is, the only outcome for which neither buyers nor sellers have an incentive to change their behavior. Market participants collectively cannot do any better than to achieve the outcome depicted in figure 1, and competition ensures that they do achieve it. The ends desired by all of society's members, in conflict because of scarcity, are in fact reconciled as harmoniously as they can be. That the equilibrium is achieved without direction from on high arguably makes it even more beautiful, as if musicians operating without a conductor were to generate spontaneously a new symphony together on stage. Within the realm of trading--of people's advancing their interests through peaceful, tacitly coordinated cooperation with others via the price system--perfectly competitive equilibrium is the highest achievement. It is, in other words, beautiful.

Moreover, the perfectly competitive equilibrium is in fact like the classical notion of beauty, a pure ideal that is to be striven for but never achieved. In Principles, Marshall acknowledges this reality on several occasions. Life is too...