Surprising Design of Market Economies

From the way roads and rails shape our cities to the way laws shape our economies, Alex Marshall has long sought and explored the underlying systems that shape our worlds. A journalist, writer, and former Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, he is the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken and Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities. Marshall is a Senior Fellow at the Regional Plan Association in New York. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Metropolis, Planning, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Slate, Salon, Architecture, Revue Urbanisme, and many other publications.

• Introduction. The Designer Disappears: Markets and Their MakersSection One. On the Books: The Markets We Make by LawChapter One. Coming into Being: In Praise of MarketsChapter Two. Me and Mine: Property, the First MarketChapter Three. Lex Non Scripta: The Laws We Don't Make, or, the Common LawChapter Four. I Am My Brother's Keeper: CooperativesChapter Five. Trust: How We Cooperate to CompeteChapter Six. Staking Claims on the Mind: Intellectual PropertyChapter Seven. Little Commonwealths: Corporations and the State That Creates ThemChapter Eight. The Future of CorporationsSection Two. Infrastructure: The Markets We Make by HandChapter Nine. From Highways to Health Care: Progress through InfrastructureChapter Ten. Making PlacesChapter Eleven. The Great Nineteenth-Century Train RobberyChapter Twelve. A Socialist Paradise: The American Road SystemChapter Thirteen. Waiting for a Train StationChapter Fourteen. What We Did Before: Path Dependence and MarketsChapter Fifteen. Police and Prisons: Freedom, Security, and DemocracyChapter Sixteen. Why Don't You Make Me? Government and ForceSection Three. Seeding the Fields: The Markets We Make in Our MindsChapter Seventeen. Common Tongue, Common Culture, Common MarketsSection Four. The Markets We Build AbroadChapter Eighteen. By Your Bootstraps: Developing Countries and MarketsChapter Nineteen. Last Night upon the Stairs: International LawSection Five. Looking Forward: Making Better MarketsConclusion. Making Better MarketsAfterword. My Own Story: A Circuitous JourneyAcknowledgmentsNotesSelected BibliographyIndex

"Offers keen insights into urban planning, public works, and even the history of New York’s onetime ambivalence toward a professional police force." (New York Times) "Marshall’s thoughtful critique accounts for social dynamics often ignored by modern economists and is grounded in a multitude of fascinating examples, underscoring his thesis that we can, and should, debate the powers allotted to our creations, rather than let them, falsely, set the terms of their own existence." (Publishers Weekly) "Conventional economics wittingly or unwittingly provides cover for the One Percent, by professing that ‘the market’ operates benevolently on its own. Alex Marshall gives us an entertaining, thoughtful, and well-written antidote to this dangerous abstraction." (Huffington Post)