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06743_Field_TCUM T308.txt
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1996-04-10
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16 lines
numbering is supported by the pervasive visual culture of
literacy.
Nonliterate societies are quite lacking in the psychic
resources to create and sustain the enormous structures of
statistical in-formation that we call markets and prices. Far
easier is the organization of production than is the training of
whole populations in the habits of translating their wishes and
desires statistically, as it were, by means of market
mechanisms of supply and demand, and the visual technology
of prices. It was only in the eighteenth century that the West
began to accept this form of extension of its inner life in the
new statistical pattern of marketing. So bizarre did this new
mechanism appear to thinkers of that time that they called it a
“Hedonistic calculus.” Prices then seemed to be comparable, in
terms of feelings and desires, to the vast world of space that