As I approach the end of my long exposition I address the promise of reforming economic institutions along the lines suggested in this book. What are the elements of culture and society that promote and retard these economic reforms? Selectively, I turn to underlying economic and ethical ideas, to values, practices, resources, and to the inherent features of the market that may favor the producer economy (Part V) and, beyond that, the broader goals of well-being and human development.

Ultimately (or penultimately, for materialists) it is ideas expressed in institutions that shape the market experience. Like many other institutions, the market can perform only as well as the intellectual disciplines that guide and criticize it. When medical practice followed the “doctrine of signatures,” ringworm was treated with fowl feces because the patterns of these feces resembled the pattern of the ringworm. Later, when medicine identified ringworm as a viral infection, the treatment changed accordingly. Similarly, without an adequate economic theory of market behavior, market institutions cannot cure their illnesses. And without adequate guiding theories, market institutions currently fail to achieve their own ends, facilitating utility maximization. (Human development is not acknowledged as an appropriate end by most market economists.) In Chapter 27 we found some fundamental causes accounting for people's misinterpretation of the sources of their own happiness; in like fashion we seek here some underlying causes accounting for the misinterpretation of the market experience by the disciplines that interpret and criticize it.