Markets are among the most effective coordination instruments ever built. The problem is not the instrument. It is what we have asked it to maximise.
This book is not anti-market and does not propose a utopia in which no one trades. Markets aggregate dispersed information, reward useful effort and allocate scarce resources better than central direction has managed. Any proposal that ignores this is not serious.
The diagnosis is narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss. Our accounting has three specific defects, and each is fixable in principle.
One. Costs that fall outside a transaction are not counted — the externality of Chapter Eight, formalised. A firm that pollutes a river and one that does not are indistinguishable in the accounts, and the polluter is cheaper. Two. Depletion is recorded as income. A forest felled appears as revenue; the loss of the forest appears nowhere. No household would keep books this way. Three. The discount rate systematically devalues the future, which means the accounting is structurally unable to represent obligations to people not yet born.