This applies to other things we connect with: Houses are roughly fungible, but once I relate to a place as home it is no longer fungible. Many jobs/roles are worthwhile before you take one, but once you have one, that’s the one you want to build and keep.
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So markets lowkey infuriate us because they treat these things & our relationships to them as *always* fungible, and yet being in the market for a house is different from dealing with the opportunity cost of not moving somewhere cheaper if you’re financially strapped.
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Marriage is one way of socially signalling you’re ‘off the market’ and thus prioritising the quality of the relationship over the (crude) ‘market price’ of the individual. Maybe ‘jobs for life’ used to be this too. I never lived through that to be able to tell.
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Maybe one function of mourning is to prepare the individual to become a new kind of interrelated being, without the social definition, interaction and trust that comes from whatever relationship they lost.
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How could you create a market that not just respected but protected the integrity of relationships between things? Between people and their spaces, between different homes/roles/identities, people with each other?
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Replying to @utotranslucence
I don’t think you can. Markets don’t function without prices—But imagine putting a price, even a very high price, on a dear relationship. Good thing there’s the rest of society, outside the market. What survives, anyway.
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Replying to @levity @utotranslucence
That said, since the survival of a relationship depends upon goods that do have prices—travel, shelter, etc. there is already implicit economic pressure on relationships. But the “exchange rate” between those pressures and one’s emotions is completely subjective.
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Replying to @levity @utotranslucence
Maybe that’s what would make it possible—the market would have at least as many currencies as there are people, and each person would maintain their sovereignty over their personal choices by setting their personal exchange rates.
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Replying to @levity @utotranslucence
An infinite exchange rate, or complete lack of liquidity, would simply encode the fact that A doesn’t trust B enough to engage in market activity with them. Some affordance like that is necessary for markets to be non-coercive, I think.
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Replying to @levity
How is an infinite exchange rate different from simply being ‘off the market’ or uninterested in making a trade with a specific individual?
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