ABSTRACT
Who directs the development of economies? Who benefi ts most from each new form that development takes?
The question “Who directs?” is not easy to answer with capitalism. For in capitalism, millions of decisions by selfi sh actors collide in markets to produce an economy. The answer therefore appears to be “the market directs”—as though the market “itself” is a collective actor. Yet as Karl Polanyi (1944) demonstrated, markets are social constructions, with states playing a big part in making, shaping, and directing them. So the longer answer for capitalist economies is: markets as directed by states-states of many kinds, at different scales, and with the state “writ large” as governance and governmental institutions.
