that book on Karly Polanyi

[Mark Kohut]

The Power of Market Fundamentalism, importantly, contributes new
research that pinpoints the moment in history when these ideas--social
naturalism and the perversity thesis--became popularized. In 1795, in a
small English town called Speenhamland, squires decreed that the poor
would be entitled to welfare depending on the going price of bread and
their family size. In 1798, Thomas Malthus reacted hostilely in his
Essay on the Principle of Population, and argued that poor relief
eliminates the scarcity that creates work incentives, thereby creating
market disfunction. But this did not immediately translate into
legislative change. Many elites worried that abolishing the Poor Law
would trigger revolution in the countryside. But in 1834, after
push-back from landed elites and clergy and with a new Whig government
in power, a Royal Commission Report issued a damning critique of the
program, spreading the ideas of Malthus to the population. The Report
reframed the agricultural downturn as an "enduring parable of the
dangers of government 'interference' with the market." The result was
welfare retrenchment, the New Poor Law, which substituted workhouses
for relief and laid a foundation for social naturalism that persists
today. Markets became embedded in ideas.
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