This paper offers an increasing returns model of the evolution of exchange institutions building on Smith’s dictum that “the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market”. Exchange institutions are characterized by a tradeoff between fixed and marginal costs: the effort necessary to execute an exchange may . . .
The market is the most humane solution so far devised to the perennial problem: what do we do about the masses?
It is the fashion today, of course, to deny that the masses are a problem at all. Leon Trotsky famously argued that after the rationalization of life following the revolution, . . .