Markets, distribution, and exchange after societal cataclysm

ABSTRACT

The report identifies constraints and opportunities for the restoration of economicn exchange following nuclear war. Four survival scenarios are postulated based on high or low levels of damage to (1) institutions that signal trading opportunities, reduce transaction costs, and regulate and enforce contracts, and (2) resources that are used to create and define wealth. The four scenarios are best case, worst case, resource abundance, and an institution intensive case. Three kinds of literature were reviewed, (1) the economics literature on formal markets, (2) the sociological literature on informal markets, and (3) the economic anthropology literature on precapitalist and pre-industrial exchange. From this corpus a set of non-market and market exchange structures are derived and rendered as rules vectors describing their operation. Each of the four survival scenarios is expounded as a subset of the possible exchange structures that is logically compatible with the constraints defining that scenario