All Intensive Purposes

Virginia Postel finds Clive Crook nailing a liberal in the act of failing to appreciate the glory of markets sufficiently:

In his latest National Journal column, Clive Crook remembers Milton Friedman, whom he describes as "the formative intellectual influence of my life." I particularly like this passage, which isn't about Friedman per se:

Much of what is wrong with popular attitudes to capitalism comes down to one thing: a lack of wonder at what uncoordinated markets can achieve. Going to a grocery store for the hundredth or thousandth time is a pretty humdrum experience. As a rule it isn't going to elicit much of an intellectual response -- though if it does, the response might be one of two kinds. The commentator Robert Kuttner once wrote of his dismay at the great number of breakfast cereals on offer in his local grocery. What a waste, was his point; who could possibly need all these different cereals? Can't we arrange things more intelligently? This is a leftist kind of response: "Put somebody sensible in charge and plan things better." The liberal response (in the proper sense of "liberal") is different: "How amazing that all these choices are available, so that every taste is catered to, and it's all so cheap."

Most of my work these days derives from this sense of wonder [and?] the curiosity it arouses about the specific creative processes behind these results. That's why I write mostly about culture and commerce rather than about government policy.

Clive Crook puts words in Kuttner's mouth, and misses something important. Suppose the following: The breakfast-cereal market is highly concentrated. A small number of firms (e.g., Kellogg's, General Mills) have a very substantial market share, notwithstanding the profusion of brands to choose from in the supermarket. These firms find themselves competing for scarce space on supermarket shelves, which they occupy with all of these different cereals, the better to crowd out competing firms. Consumers choose cereals, but retailers allocate shelf space to manufacturers. In these circumstances, the many varieties of breakfast cereal do not reflect consumer demand.

I'm no expert in breakfast cereals, but I do recall reading descriptions of this market suggesting what I have written above. I probably like breakfast cereal more than most people, but very few of the cereals stocked in most grocery store interest me. So when I read Kuttner's comment, even as the object of scorn from Crook and Postrel, my thought is that he was dismayed as the specific array of cereals that he saw for sale, not at variety per se. Maybe, with all these cereals, not every taste is being catered too. (And did Kuttner express the wish for central planning that Crook ascribes to him? Not in what's said here.)

Virginia Postrel has a lot of interesting things to say, but this post strikes me as demonstrating the opposite of curiosity. It's difficult to be curious if you're busy congratulating yourself. Maybe Kuttner had some intuition that the breakfast-cereal market wasn't working well, and maybe he didn't, but Crook is too smitten with the notion of free markets to notice. Likewise Postrel. If I had to bet, I'd guess that Kuttner eats breakfast cereal and Crook and Postrel do not.