Formal economics normalizes price determinacy as a basis for equalizing supply and demand on the premise that rationality governs choices made by the producers and consumers of any commodity. On this premise, equity between productive citizens, subject to self-governing market mechanisms, will bring an end to historic catastrophes and injustices in the post Cold-War years. Proponents of free trade in a world economy subscribe to this premise.

In the real world, however, especially as it is evolving today, price indeterminacy prevails, which is to say that political and social forces fundamentally affect prices, distorting or re-shaping many long-established structures of the world system.  The outcome will resemble the prismatic model, a system in which mutually contradictory norms and practices are superimposed, co-existing in an unstable mixture.  An important factor in this amalgam involves tensions between subsidized and tributary canteens -- beneficiaries of the former enjoy low prices while victims of the latter must pay excessively.  The rich get richer and the poor poorer, and hegemonic power shifts from the familiar geographic heartlands to a floating world of rootless global syndicates. While public attention remains attached to the spotlighted front stage of world politics with its colorful characters, the decisive scene of economic and political power shifts to a subvisible back stage run by colorless men in black.  Contrasts between Front and Back, both global in extent, will replace familiar geographic dichotomies oriented to the West/East or North/South distinctions.

The latter will be dispersed in a host of mushrooming subvisible industrial parks now sprouting in weak countries unable to protect themselves from predatory multi-national operations managed by powerful syndicates able to supply their own basic needs while exploiting workers, despoiling the environment, avoiding taxes and corrupting officials -- these are the "subsidized canteens".  By contrast, long-established and more costly industrial plants found in the industrialized democracies will find themselves, increasingly, victimized in "tributary canteens" that compel them to pay higher wages, to maintain environmental safeguards, and to help fund public services and welfare costs.

Conditions in the more "advanced" countries will deteriorate while wealth flees.  Unfortunately, conditions in the poorer countries will not improve -- in fact, for the most part, they will get worse. The accumulated wealth generated by this new form of global price indeterminacy will be siphoned through a widely-dispersed archipelago of politically powerless tax havens where luxurious life-styles are available to rich visitors,  and surplus funds can readily be laundered for legitimate re-investment and conspicuous consumption in an increasingly meta-prismatic world system.  Hegemonic power will no longer be geographically concentrated -- instead, it will be dispersed in a floating subvisible archipelago.

See the full text at pages: [] paper -- part 1 || paper -- part 2 []

2.  Because this paper offers some new concepts and terms, readers may wish to look at a companion paper called Coming to Terms with Social Science; also prepared for the Seoul IPSA Congress.  It looks at the need for new concepts generated by a world in transition and discusses a technology now available for sharing and developing these concepts through a global mechanism made possible by the World Wide Web -- go to my COCTA paper, Coming to Terms

3.  An example of the use of this mechanism can be found in another paper, Turmoil among Nations, with related concept records also available on the Riggs Home Page.

4.  Several essays that explain the onomantic approach for introducing new concepts, by contrast with traditional terminological and lexicographic paradigms for defining established terms, can also be seen on this site.

Questions and requests for a copy of the paper (on paper) may be sent to the author by: e-mail

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Posted: 11 August 1997 (marginal changes 2 October 1998)

See COCTA paper on handling new concepts: "Coming to Terms"