The street nobody sells to

On a busy shopping street in Shubra el-Kheima, nearly every shopfront has a loudspeaker over the door, each one calling out its offers on a loop.

In one sense this is the market working beautifully. The shop with the loudest speaker pulls in a few more people. Its neighbour notices and buys a louder one. Nobody planned it, it cost each owner very little, and every one of them is responding sensibly to what brings customers in.

The people living in the flats above the shops were never part of that trade. They did not sell anything and they cannot buy their way out. Neither can the old man trying to sleep on the third floor, or the child trying to read at the kitchen table. The cost of every sale lands on someone who was never at the counter.

The market was not going to fix that part. The owner who switches his speaker off loses a few sales to the shop next door. The resident who complains has nothing to offer anyone in return.

None of this is an argument against markets. They are superb at hearing what people want and arranging for it to arrive tomorrow. When a problem has that shape, handing it to the market is the cheapest answer there is.

Some problems are shaped differently. The cost falls outside the deal. The payoff arrives in years rather than days. The incentive points the wrong way for every single person involved. Waiting for the market to solve those can take a lifetime.

I suspect that saying the market will sort it out is sometimes a way of not looking up at the windows. It sounds like a plan. Often it is a polite way of handing a hard problem to nobody.