Our habitation economy remains largely invisible because of the consensus that our society is organized around a market economy. The problem is that a market economy is defined as one in which people buy and sell commodities. However, most of the things that we consume today are not similar to the items that economists have labeled as commodities. The factory that Adam Smith described in The Wealth of Nations made pins and David Ricardo's analysis of international trade focused on cloth and wine. Their analyses depended on a definition of commodities as standardized goods that are available from many different producers. Moreover, they also assume a transaction between buyer and seller that was a one-shot transaction rather than a longterm relationship.

Karl Polanyi noted 80 years ago that three of the core elements of an economy—land, labor, and money—are fictitious commodities because they were not produced to be sold on a market. Land is nature subdivided into parcels of different sizes, labor is the activity of human beings, and the supply of money is generally carefully regulated by central banks. It follows that the supply and demand for these key economic inputs cannot possibly be equilibrated by ongoing changes in prices. In a word, Polanyi shows that the existence of these fictitious commodities undermines the claim that a market economy could be a self-regulating structure.

The argument here builds on Polanyi, but it is somewhat different. Polanyi was effectively distinguishing between the process of commodification and the production of actual commodities. Society creates a market for labor where the work of human beings is effectively commodified, but this project of commodification does not actually transform labor into a commodity that is equivalent to a bushel of wheat or a ton of steel. Labor remains a fictitious commodity even as we pretend that the labor market is just like any other commodity market.

The point is that almost anything can be commodified. We have seen that happen with trips into outer space, nonfungible tokens, and the service of surrogates to carry a fertilized egg to childbirth. In fact, most forms of care—childcare, healthcare, eldercare—can be purchased on the market. However, the fact that something is commodified does not magically transform it into a standardized good transferred between buyer and seller in a single moment.