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“Venetian Fair" shop with two figures, Ludwigsburg Porcelain Manufactory, ca. 1765. Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2012 Virginia Postrel gave this speech as an after-dinner keynote to the annual conference of the Atlas Network, an international organization of free-market policy-oriented think tanks. She's just posted the transcript on her Substack because the popularity of her WSJ article on shopping and equality got her thinking of turning the ideas into a book, and maybe even an institute. "Do we really want to leave thinking about demand—the half of the market that accounts for most of our everyday economic experience, and certainly for most of the variety of our everyday economic experience—to the Marxists, the Freudians, and the status-obsessed? To people who have contempt for markets and for what Deirdre McCloskey in her important recent book calls 'bourgeois dignity'? "Just because thinking about why people buy what they buy means thinking about culture and psychology rather than the role of the state doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant to freedom. "The good news is that there is a significant group of scholars who do understand that shopping has something to do with freedom. "They are feminists." - Virginia Postural
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