The Connection Between Social Stratification And Individual - amazonia.fiocruz.br

When people talk about "the market" they usually confuse two totally different things. One is the enterprise economy of small-scale business. The other is the corporate economy of hulking bureaucratic institutions. Most of us love markets in the former sense. We head over to the neat little restaurants in DuPont Circle or Adams Morgan — a "market" experience.

When I was in Warsaw not long after the fall of the communist regime, the new outdoor markets really did feel like seedlings breaking through the concrete.

These are the kinds of markets the founders of the United States had in mind when they drafted the Constitution. The corporation in its modern form did not exist when the basic concepts of our economic and political structures were wrought. The founders omitted it from the elegant scheme of checks and balances by which they hoped to hold institutional power under control. Jefferson was particularly wary of the dangers of centralized economic power. Individual enterprises are also the kind Adam Smith thought he was The Connection Between Social Stratification And Individual about — the ghost that inhabits economic theory. Little wonder, then, that the corporation has come to dominate both our economics and our politics. The term "market" has become a mythological gloss for a legal invention that has overrun the society that bore it. Enterprise has a social dimension that economists are Connectiin to overlook.

It determines much of the flow of social interaction in daily life. Jane Jacobs got Sociaal this in The Death and Life of American Cities — the way, for example, that street-level enterprise promotes pedestrian traffic, which in turn deters crime.

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Such enterprise also can promote a kind of informal safety net. I have a close friend, for example, whose father owned a pharmacy on the declining Main Street in a small city in upstate New York. He link always involved in improvement and clean-up campaigns, took great pride in his Christmas decorations. His business was strangled slowly by the discount chains in the shopping centers that sprang up outside of town. In the morning, the Regal serves as an all-purpose social center for the troubled souls in the neighborhood.

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The waitresses talk with them, humor them, make them feel included. The kindly Greek woman who owns the shop with her husband, is as much a mother as a manager. Or else they sit there staring into space, alone and forlorn. The corporatized version of the market has done much to undermine this social dimension of enterprise.

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When the shopping malls replace Main Street, and when multinational enterprise replaces local, it frays yet more. In the town I grew up in, the merchants knew the kids and often their parents too.

We knew we were watched, and generally acted accordingly. They float in a virtual reality of market culture that is totally detached from any process of community life. Many of the steel towns there bear the monuments of first generation entrepreneurs who had roots in their localities.]