Can a real self be found between the Scylla of anomie and the Charybdis of legislated identity?
As behavioral economists labor to demonstrate, the chief problem with markets is the idiosyncratic consumer. The math works out; it bears no grudges. It implies a just, efficient order that assimilates available information and distributes social product according to an impersonal, incorruptible logic (that’s the gist of neoclassical normative economics). If not for the consumer’s stubborn biases, if not for their annoying habit of letting social relations interfere with market math, we would have a Pareto-efficient paradise, but instead people have friends who trade favors, they have family members and neighbors they help out, they enjoy the smug pride that derives from the exercise of position, that derives from the noblesse oblige of altruism. Because markets are embedded in these legacy social relations, not everyone’s dollar is worth the same everywhere. Other forms of intangible, uncountable capital — social capital (who you know) and cultural capital (what you know) and even sub
