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| Chris Hughes and Taylor Nelms join OIKOS for the NYU Steinhardt Dean’s Public Square Event on Marketcrafters: The 100 Year Struggle To Shape The American Economy. For the past half-century, public policy narratives have been dominated by the tendency to treat free markets as if they make and maintain themselves.
Marketcrafters interrupts this narrative with portraits of real people and institutions that actively shaped markets. Jesse Jones, for example, played a key leadership role via the Reconstruction Finance Corporation from the New Deal Era through the Second World War. From efforts to recapitalize American banks or to build out the housing market, to converting supply chains for aviation production as war efforts ramped up, the agency within agencies is fully in view. Once we can see that intervention is not the exception but the rule, indeed that major zones of economic activity — Medicare, energy markets, inflation controls, semiconductors, financial innovations — have been generated through marketcraft, we can think seriously about what kind of industrial policy we want. What kinds of investments in making and maintaining markets are required to meet the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century in a fashion that is inclusive and sustaining for all? |
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| Marketcrafters enters the conversation we are having around metamorphosis, or the problem of transformation. Whether through mythic transfigurations of bodies or subtler conversions structuring modern political economy, forms shift. Institutions harden and loosen. Households, firms, industries, and states reorganize. The question is never simply what changed, but what had to be made in order for change to appear as if natural.
Despite decades of scholarship and a generation of critiques of neoliberal rationality and governance, Americans — from the political center left to the business pages — continue to speak as though markets exist in the wild. We tell ourselves that markets hum along until policymakers intervene. But this story is false. The economy is not a natural ecosystem with occasional storms; it is a vast, continuously engineered infrastructure, stabilized and steered by people who have names, biographies, moods, moral sensibilities, blind spots, and institutional commitments. |
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| This insistence on people is central. Hughes’ history of the American state moves through biographical portraits: Bill Martin at the Federal Reserve, Jesse Jones at the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Katherine “Kay” Ellison at HCFA shaping Medicare, Robert Noyce and SEMATECH, the architects of Obama- and Biden-era industrial policy. These are not “great men” in the mythic sense. Rather, biography is a device for making institutional behavior graspable. Institutions do not think; people do. Bureaucracies operate, but only because individuals inside them are trying, improvising, arguing, and sometimes failing.
So too, stories matter because we remember them. The Presbyterian Fed Chair who withdrew from a tennis tournament because it violated the Sabbath. A way of thinking about rule-following becomes the moral architecture for short-term credit markets. Sometimes, religiosity is not a quirky sidebar but rather a clue about how ideas, habits, and ethical formations sediment into governance. |
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| Throughout the conversation, Hughes and Taylor Nelms return to the foundational claim that ideas matter, that they are operative instruments in the production of economic worlds. Markets are constructed environments where the conceptual models carried by policymakers, economists, and industry leaders take material form. Marketcraft is a deliberate shaping of markets through state institutions to advance public goals. It is neither synonymous with “intervention,” (because that term presumes a prior natural order) nor reducible to fiscal or monetary policy. Instead, marketcraft names the thick middle where coordination, procurement, underwriting, standards-setting, liquidity management, and the like, shape outcomes as a matter of course.
Empirically, states are always actively shaping markets, the only question is how. The danger of imagining a natural market periodically disrupted by state excess is that it obscures the constant, constitutive work of governance. |
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| Thus, metamorphosis returns. Markets are not static containers but shifting forms sustained by continuous work. If we continue to believe in the fantasy of a self-regulating market, we misrecognize our own capacity to shape economic futures. Rather than debate whether government should intervene, we might ask: what forms of marketcraft best advance collective aims?
In so doing, we can keep in view the malleabilty of technological futures. Artificial intelligence, clean power, and semiconductor fabrication do not evolve according to some inevitability of innovation; they are structured by procurement decisions, regulatory frameworks, and public investment strategies that could be otherwise. To abandon the fiction of the free market is to gain the capacity to debate the purposes markets should serve, rather than whether they should be left alone. The metamorphosis is cognitive before it is institutional: to change how we describe the world is to imagine what we can build within it. |
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Our special thanks to The Financial Health Network, Dean Jack Knott, and the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication for supporting this event. |
The Kinship Economy Working Group