Myths of Merchants and Markets

News sections of newspapers around the world decry street markets as sources of corruption, but in the metro, travel or food sections, those same markets are celebrated as sources of sociability, economic mobility, and local character, yet markets, forerunners of the contemporary complex system of trade and commerce are notably absent from the business pages. Markets and merchants are intimately woven into human history, human history is, in no small degree, a history of markets. Important elements of law, politics and family life emerged from markets, and religion spread by trading relationships. Markets are simultaneously abstract and concrete, flexible and stable and into markets policy makers have poured their expectations, scholars their expectations, politicians their praise and criticism, immigrants their hopes for better lives and markets are constantly being remade in light of new opportunities and demands for new trading relationships.

The history of markets and merchants permeates most every scholarly discipline, the humanities are represented, no less than social science in examining lives conditioned by markets in one way or another. Still, policy makers and politicians hold biased views of one type of market, the original type of market, the street market. These perceptions are biased by the last century’s revolution of storefront retail, regulation and currently, commerce globalized by internet technologies. Yet the street market persists, in the industrialized west no less than other parts of the world. More than persisting, the street or open-air market is further catalyzed by changes in storefront retail, in regulations and in changes in consumer demand and government needs. Markets and merchants are here to stay.

This article enumerates ten myths associated with markets which shape policy and economic perceptions of markets and merchants. The stereotypes are common, but not always explicitly articulated, rather they settle in to pronouncements as assumptions that underlie convictions or decisions about “suitable” economic activity.

The ten myths are:

1. Markets are disorganized and disorderly

2. Markets are sources of illegality, particularly in taxation or merchandise acquisition

3. Markets and merchants are dirty or unsanitary

4. Markets are dangerous and merchants defraud customers

5. Markets are dead-end activities and merchants live hand to mouth

6. Markets are inefficient and merchants are not “real” business people
7. Markets are unimportant, disconnected from the larger socio-economic situation
8. Merchants are without ambitions
9. Markets are for the poor and merchants are typically the poor or destitute
10. Markets are biased by race or class

Like all myths each of these has some basis in reality and the reality will always be a mixed bag of positive and negative perceptions. What matters most is how particular interest groups and organizations harness negative perceptions and use them to command the attention of policy makers. In the weeks ahead I will pursue a fundamentally constructive purpose: I will disentangle these myths in order to show how merchants and policy makers are recovering markets as important tools of city planners and public policy makers as well as helping households realize their economic aspirations.