The Limits of Market Organization.

• Author: Murphy, Robert P.
• Position: Book review

The Limits of Market Organization Edited by Richard R. Nelson New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005. Pp. viii, 386. $45.00.

The quickest tip I can give the potential reader of Richard R. Nelson's collection The Limits of Market Organization is that it is difficult to read. Each of the thirteen chapters deals with a particular area, ranging from financial clearing systems to health care to campaign finance, in which unbridled laissez-faire would be undesirable. The normative argument is supplemented by an often-detailed history of government regulation in the area under study, so that some one hundred pages of the book are devoted to a chronology of legislation and to numerous statistics relevant to the discussion in the various chapters. Needless to say, The Limits of Market Organization works better as a reference work for the academic rather than as a quick read for the intellectual layperson.

Besides the monotony of the content, the book has a more frustrating feature--namely, the antiseptic euphemisms used for policy recommendations. Just as one who reads large excerpts from the Pentagon Papers might find himself being sucked into the worldview of the war planners, so too does the reader of this book find himself numbed by the very language used by Nelson's contributors. Needless to say, no one ever explicitly suggests that men with guns take certain amounts of money away from citizens and spend that money. Rather, we are treated to pleas for "public responsibility" and "government investment." After reading chapter after chapter of such claims, they sound more and more reasonable and indeed moderate. One cannot really grasp this phenomenon without reading several chapters, but the following quotation is a good example of what I have in mind:

Both private and public governance have played important roles in the development of the [Internet].... Public funding remains important for information technology R&D and the support of large university infrastructure that trains engineers and computer scientists.... The U.S. telecommunications infrastructure that underpins the Internet has moved toward a deregulated, competitive structure, but public and private regulation of the organizations that govern Internet standardization and technical infrastructure management has expanded. Indeed, the very growth of the Internet and related opportunities for investment and profit from its commercial applications are influencing demands for greater...