I am stunned at how the essay written by Radford could be so in-depth and so frank. I learned so much in the thirteen pages not just about how economics can be applied to his situation, but how an economic system grows and changes. The most interesting part of the article that I found was how the market was able to develop so quickly despite the obvious handicaps they had in place (lack of solid currency, lack of goods, etc.). It mirrored the creation of currency-based exchange thousands of years ago, but it took humans in some regions thousands of years to abandon the barter system for a market system, not several months as it did at Radford’s POW camp. The fact that the system so much resembles the laissez-faire capitalist economy also somewhat astounded me, for the uncontrolled market allowed the goods price to find its equilibrium through the constant exchanges, people were able to get “wealthier” in cigarettes or BMKs and vice versa through simple economic understanding, and the trade and exchange fluctuated with the events that surrounded the arrival and circulation of the Red Cross parcels and also news considering war.
The first question I would like to ask concerning the article is whether the complex market system developed in the POW camp is commonplace, or only found in camps or prisons in which the prisoners have possessions in any way? It is obvious that in most prisons, and for this case, forced internment camps, all possessions technically can be taken away at any moment by the guards
The second question I ask concerns a slight problem I noticed within the system: did the black market trade which was available for additional demanded goods through the German guards make the economy more open or less viable, for it brought in additional goods to the market but it allowed necessary currency or other demanded goods to exit circulation within the camp?
The third, two-part, question relates to the final paragraph, for I don’t understand how “infinite means” is possible due to our constant demand for different goods. Would it ever be possible to prove the final hypothesis in the essay correct? Economists can debate its merits in theory, but in the end wouldn’t it be a philosophical question rather than an economic one because it’s impossible to simulate an environment where everyone has every possible want satisfied without effort?
It seems, after reading this essay, that if you put together a large enough sample of random people and a distribution of goods in any environment that a market system is bound to develop. After all, as we learned in Econ 108, people value different goods at different amounts, and it’s to everyone’s advantage (in most cases) to engage in trade in order to gain the greatest amount of goods desired. The market system, though, seems to continuously become more complicated if the amount of goods does not decrease exponentially, for in the reading it was seen as greater utility to have restrictions on the market, or a more complex exchange system, and so on. The reading was able to, in the end, give an example of how an economy develops, how people attempt to maximize utility, and how the law of demand works on a small or broad scale.
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