Chapter 1 The How of the Market
Chapter 2 The Price is Right
Chapter 3 What Prices Communicate
Chapter 4 Unbeatable, Imperfect Markets
Chapter 5 The Seen and the Unseen
Chapter 6 The Market and Natural Disasters
Chapter 7 Taxation and Regulation
Chapter 8 Attempts to Perfect the Market
Chapter 9 The Unrealized
Chapter 10 Implications for our View of Society
Per L. Bylund is assistant professor of entrepreneurship and Records-Johnston Professor of Free Enterprise in the School of Entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University.
Bylund (Oklahoma State) shows how markets help society improve
choices about alternative future opportunities. Government
regulations, in contrast, often make these choices less efficient
for society as a whole. Bylund uses a thought experiment about the
rational economic choices people in a small, simple, local society
make. In a free market, apple growers and nail manufacturers depend
on prices to signal the relative value of goods and services. These
signals, in turn, guide entrepreneurs toward investments that make
new, valuable things available. As economic production diversifies,
prices coordinate entrepreneurs’ activities. When governments
regulate and subsidize specific economic activities, they change
entrepreneurs’ calculations about future investment, narrowing the
possibilities for efficiently made and innovative products. Efforts
to regulate or ban sweatshops, for example, hurt the unrealized
potential of markets for increasing value in society. Markets allow
for a more efficient and competent response to natural disasters
than governments... [T]his clear, readable book will stimulate
discussion in economics, business, philosophy, and economic policy
classes. Summing Up:Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates
through faculty.
*Choice Reviews*
Public choice scholars are well versed in highlighting the unseen
effects of regulation. However, Per Bylund, in his important book,
The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized, suggests that regulation
affects individuals far more perniciously than what is typically
recognized. Bylund paints a picture of the market process that is
both elegant and nuanced. . . .The book synthesizes insights from
many classic writers, including Bastiat, Menger, Mises, and Hayek,
in a refreshing yet familiar manner. It is a well-written, detailed
exploration of the functioning of the market process that gains a
great deal of traction using straightforward concepts. The author
encourages the reader to think more deeply about the process by
which mutually beneficial outcomes tend to be consistently realized
in the market. Indeed, reflection on the realistic features of the
market’s error-correcting tendencies— and the consequences of
distorting these tendencies—makes this book a worthwhile read for
laymen and scholars alike.
*Public Choice*
Per Bylund’s The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized is a
well-reasoned and written exposition of how regulations in the
economy have deleterious effects on our everyday lives. It takes
the reader through basic economic reasoning to telling examples and
in the process makes the very important point about reorienting our
perspective on exchange, production, and wealth creation as an
ongoing process that is always in progress. Today's so-called
inefficiencies are tomorrow's profit opportunities for those
entrepreneurs that act upon them and release new ways to release
the mutual gains from trade. Regulations thwart this ongoing and
ceaseless progress. Entrepreneurship, on the other hand, is the
prime mover of progress and improvements in the material conditions
of man. A great read, highly recommended.
*Peter Boettke, George Mason University*
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