Venkatesh Rao

you need a lot of consensus (and a lot of infrastructure) before you can have anything called a "market"

uhh, yeah, there were a few hundred thousand years of human history before there were anything like markets. gift and barter economies for most of it. if you actually have to work to overcome the 'market as default' thought, just shows how much koolaid you've consumed.

I would have to understand that with a bit more clarity. Markets are created by use of law to suppress involuntary transfers across the spectrum from the most obviously physical to the most abstractly normative as to decrease costs. (Barter(goods),Trade (money), Markets (prices))

So in the sense you mean math (positional naming for scale independent measurement), or the grammar facility (continuous recursive disambiguation), exchange is a facility like grammar. But yes, markets are an institutional byproduct of continuous suppression of criminality.

As far as I know, markets are not culturally contingent, because there is no alternative. If you mean the relationship between subsistence provision, market (voluntary) participation, and non-market (involuntary) participation in production distribution and trade, then yes.

What we consider 'morality' (the moral intuition) is just the intuitionistic perception of debt and return between individuals and the group, within the limits of reciprocity (returns) and proportionality(group retention).