The more my age advances, the more I realize that the only fair market is the free market and that the only value that should prevail when it is in conflict with other values is Freedom, one manifestation of which in the business world is the equality of opportunities (market freedom). Any measure we take to correct the perceived failures of free markets tends to distort it in ways that not only make it un-free and unfair but also attract rent-seekers who often do the rent-seeking at the expense of the least advantaged groups in a society.
I know that many of you who sit in positions of privilege do not share this view with me. But this might be exactly because you are already sitting in a position of privilege and have probably never genuinely experienced how someone starts from zero. Let me start with my own lived experience.
I was born into a poor family in one of the worst neighborhoods of our city in Iran, with official and nick-names of the neighborhood literally meaning “[neighborhood] without wire/electricity” and “established by force”. My parents – of whom I am immensely proud - are completely illiterate. Not knowing how to read and write - and even worse, belonging to the Azeri minority, how to speak the official language of the country – they have always struggled raising me and my other five brothers and sisters. My father, as a factory worker, had to go to work from 4 a.m. to 8 p.m., and my mother busied herself with raising the kids at home.
I am not going to go into the details but just wanted to say that being born into such conditions, the first 20-years of my life was replete with all sorts of hardships and difficulties. I had to start working at the age of 6 or 7 in a carpet-weaning workshop – a kind of job that I still consider one of the examples of crimes against humanity - from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., with the exception of school seasons, during which I was privileged to work part-time and attend the school the rest of the day. But the great thing about working in a manual job, which does not require a lot of thinking, is that it gives you ample time to (day)dream. This, I did for more than 10 years before being admitted to the Law School of my dream in Tehran.
But how did I get into such a prestigious university? The answer is by taking advantage of ever-disappearing outposts of equality of opportunity, which gave me the opportunity to enter free competitive battles in which almost all of the participants were treated equally. The nation-wide entrance exam for state/public universities in Iran is the fiercest competition one can face and it has an unparalleled reputation for incorruptibility (though there are some backdoors to the Universities for certain people). After studying hard for 9 months from 5 in the morning to 12 at night and obtaining the rank of 38 out of more than 500,000 competitors, I enrolled in the University in Tehran, where I had the privilege of coming to know an entirely new class of people and styles of lives that gave me a huge culture shock with scales far greater than the one I experienced when I migrated from Iran to the Western hemisphere.
It was this environment that made me more ambitious and encouraged me to pursue my studies somewhere else. If it was not for the anonymized and impersonal artificial markets (exams) for University entrance, which kept the human biases, bigotry, and prejudices at bay in the selection process, I and a lot of other people like me were still sitting in carpet-weaving factories weaving stupid Persian carpets.
But I have always struggled once external factors interfered to make free-market processes fair by adding extra – and often arbitrary- measures to markets. In my home country, these ultra-market measures were often the test for religious piety, and devotion to the government and its ideology, and in western countries they are the formal considerations of citizenship, residency, race, gender, and informal considerations of cronyism, cultism, tribalism, favoritism, etc. Whether ideological, religious, progressive, or regressive, they have always worked against me and the people like me with an immensely discouraging impact. In my eyes, they seem to pursue a single objective: protectionism under the guise of fairness with the aim of keeping out the least advantaged people and protecting those who often have a greater influence on the decision-making processes. Let me give you another example of my lived experience.
During the last couple of years that I have been in the academic job market, I have applied for several positions that I thought I would be a great fit, but eventually, I was not selected. The academic world is a small world and you often come to know who has been selected for a specific position. I am always very happy with the result when I realize that I have lost the game against brilliant minds, but in the majority of the cases, I came to know that I have lost the race to someone not even having one-fifth of my skills, expertise, and experience. These all happened in a job market where the selection committees did not have much skin in the game. I believe the outcome would have been totally different if I were competing in an anonymized or impersonal free market with the committees unaware of my name (which reveals my country/region of origin). I would have attained even better results if the selection committee had 100% skin in the game instead of a committee that only distributes/spends taxpayer money.
I have to mention that I was once offered a position that I considered accepting. But once I got wind of the fact that some of the extra competitive elements had influenced the decision of the selection committee, I decided to decline the offer without hesitation, as I believed that me accepting the offer would have meant depriving someone else, who was more competent than me, from the opportunity. Please do not see this as virtue signaling. I had to mention it because I did not tell you why I am so immensely proud of my parents: among others, their uncompromising insistence in my upbringing on not infringing other peoples’ rights, irrespective of the consequences.
These two examples of my lived experience, from which I have left tons of details out, are why I would never trade free markets with fair, just, or whatever nice adjective you put before the word ‘market’. It was the free market/competition and equality of opportunity that helped me and thousands/millions like me out of the abject conditions, and it is the human considerations of fairness – extremely prone to rent-seeking behavior that welcomes all sorts of bigotry and prejudice – that have held and are holding the disadvantaged and the underprivileged back.
This is of course not to say that free markets are always perfect. We are not discussing perfection here; the point is that the alternatives are often worse. In other words, just like most of our social phenomena, perhaps the free market is the worst form of organizing human societies, except for all the others.
