The growing popularity of the market as an arbiter of economic decision-making verges on reification. The first comment in many public media after an unusual event is “how did the market react?” To whom does a short-term up or down movement around a longer-term trend really matter, except to financial traders?
From a systemic perspective, a serious problem with market thinking is its logic of a bottom up causality (which incidentally is also prevalent in the political paradigm of majority decision-making). It rests on the belief that the sum total of decisions that serve the benefit of an individual system automatically benefits the collective. Instead, we observe increasing inequalities. Market thinking (e.g. the market wants it) also drives linear economic growth, consumerism, a short-term orientation and unsustainable economic behaviour.
Biomatrix Systems Theory speaks of the emerging middle: the systems at each level are co-produced by systems from outer and inner levels, as well as itself. For example, the finance crisis is an emergence – we could call it huge negative value for societies – that arises from the selfish decisions of its financial parts, the perpetuation of the market philosophy which inspires and reinforces the individual behaviour and the nature of the top-down regulation (or absence thereof). Thus changing the current market paradigm requires redesign across levels – to push current market philosophy from its pedestal.
| 
