Market Orthodoxy

The established, institutionalized set of beliefs about markets that dominate economics and policy—the often-unexamined assumptions that markets are efficient, that prices reflect value, that competition benefits consumers, that market outcomes are fair, and that market mechanisms should be extended to more and more domains of life. Market orthodoxy includes specific commitments: that supply and demand determine optimal prices, that market allocation is superior to planning, that market incentives drive innovation, that market discipline improves organizations, and that "market forces" are natural rather than constructed. Like all orthodoxies, it provides a framework for economic thinking, but it functions as ideology—making market arrangements seem natural and inevitable, obscuring how markets are created and maintained by state power, and delegitimizing non-market alternatives. Market orthodoxy determines what economic arrangements are considered "efficient," what policies are "distortions," and who counts as "economically literate."

Example: "He assumed that markets naturally produce optimal outcomes—not because he'd studied market failures, but because market orthodoxy had made that assumption seem like common sense. The orthodoxy's power is making its central claims feel like observations rather than assumptions."

by Dumu The Void March 17, 2026