Trading

• Trading has been around for a very long time, even if for most of human history, groups more or less cooperatively produced and shared the basic needs of life. • The invention of money allowed for extensive impersonal trading, an expanded division of labour, and increasing interdependency, now reaching across the entire globe. • Markets are always socially constructed and, accordingly, there is enormous variation in the institutional features, conditions, instruments and legal arrangements which make exchange possible. • There us no such thing as a “neutral ” set of rules governing market exchanges; there is considerable confusion as regards the idea of a “Free Market.” • As the unintended product of actors each trying to bring about their goals, markets may create socially disastrous outcomes. Some of these can be addressed only by conscious collective action. • There is no market mechanism to guarantee work for all that want to work, or which guarantees that all existing jobs will pay a non-poverty wage, still less, that all will get the jobs and wages they “deserve.” • Globalization increases uncertainties and inhibits our capacities to solve many problems, environmental, economic and social