"Relying on markets alone would make for a poor, dishonest, and miserable society. Banks lend for the short term, and business has to make a profit in less time than that. It succeeds brilliantly when product life is shorter than credit maturities, in retail, consumer durables, services, and...

Markets are taken as the norm in economics and in much of political and media discourse. But if markets are superior why does the public sector remain so large? Avner Offer provides a distinctive new account of the effective temporal limits on private, public, and social activity. Understanding...