I was eager to read Paul De Grauwe’s The Limits of the Market because I profoundly agree with its premise that the false dichotomy between ‘the state’ and ‘the market’ has led to bad public policies and lower social welfare. The book is a short overview of the flaws of this dichotomous view of the world. It organises its discussion around two sets of reasons why a ‘free market’ is a meaningless abstraction: externalities and ‘internalities’.

The idea of an externality is familiar of course – that individual choices by a person or business have consequences, good or bad, for others. Once you start thinking about it, you realise externalities are pervasive. Indeed, they include many not acknowledged in standard economic theory which assumes fixed preferences, when of course preferences are socially determined. As De Grauwe points out, it is not easy to address externalities with government policies (not that this means there’s no point in trying): “The market fails in the face of externalities. When this happens, the government must step in. However …. that is also the moment at which the discrepancy between individual and collective interest is widest.”

The word ‘internality’ is new to me – though this is the second time I’ve come across it used by a Francophone author. It refers to the capacity humans have to make decisions that damage their ‘rational’ self-interest. I would think of this as a failure of one of the other assumptions of standard welfare economics, namely individual utility maximisation. The book makes use of Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between System I thinking (emotion, instinct) and System II (reasoned calculation). Market outcomes that satisfy the latter can adversely affect – say – our fairness instinct. “This dissatisfaction creates an opportunity for governments to fill the emotional gap left by the free market and to focus on System I, which steers our emotions. Many emotions find an outlet through government.” Well, most people probably have rather negative feelings about government, but one sees what he means.

The book is an extended reflection on this dual set of market failures, and the inevitable involvement of both (coercive) government actions and individual choices in the economy. I ended up being a bit disappointed, as it does fall between the two stools of accessibility for the general readership and technical rigour for professional economists, so I didn’t feel I got tremendous new insights. It’s also expensive for a very short book (£25 for 160 pages), albeit not in stupid academic book price territory. Still, the framework set out for thinking about the roles of government and market is neat, and I’ll recommend it to students who are particularly interested in the welfare economics but won’t want anything technical.