Firm - Risk Article

The firm as a a bulwark against the vicissitudes of the market

Individuals devote much of their energy in mitigating the conditions of the free market.

• This is our evolutionary advantage. We are social, hierarchical, political animals.
  
• We self-organise into anti-competitive associations – call them cartels - of all kinds:
  
  • Families
    
  • Clubs
    
  • Firms
    
  • Parties
    
  • Governments
    
• These cartels are not run on laissez faire lines. That would defeat their very purpose.
  • They are intended to mitigate against the horrors of the Hobbesian world.
    
  • That is to say, the exact point of human organisation at any level is to undermine market equality, not to promote it.
    
• At the highest level there is a free market, but it operates between firms (or even Governments).As with any dynamic system it survives and thrives courtesy of tensions between:
  
  • Government (cartel) and market (nature)
    
• market (nature) and Firm (cartel)
  
• Firm (cartel) and individual (nature)
  

Somewhere within these tensions – in the breakdown between nomological machines, we find the phenomenon – maybe phenomena – of nonsense jobs.