Visible and Invisible Hands

From: Freeman | Date: April 1, 2007| Author: Rasmussen, Douglas B; Uyl, Douglas J Den | Copyright information

It has often been said that markets are led "as if by an invisible hand" to bring about order and cooperation among people. Markets use incentives and mutual interests to achieve this harmonious result. But there is another, "older" mode of organizing people, namely to organize them around what is "good" or "right."That would seem to be the way of ethics. Ethics, in contrast to markets, seems to organize people around authoritative commands and directives.

This raises a question: how c...

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