Markets can often be harsh in compelling people to make unpalatable economic choices any reasonable person would not take under normal conditions. Thus, workers laid off in mid-career accept lower paying jobs that are beneath their professional experience and training for want of better alternatives. Economic migrants leave their families and cross borders (legally or illegally) in search of a livelihood. Over forty million United States residents forego health insurance in the face of unaffordable premiums. In response to unrelenting increases in drug prices, many elderly people on fixed incomes cut back on other essential expenditures like food and heat to purchase medication for their chronic ailments. Countless Third World families rely on child labor to supplement meager household incomes, and in the process, condemn their children to a lifetime of illiteracy and invincible poverty. Unable to keep up with rapidly escalating property taxes or rents, long-time residents of gentrified neighborhoods have had to move farther away from urban centers and put up with longer commutes to their workplace. These are examples of economic compulsion – an all-too-frequent state of affairs in which people are driven to make distasteful choices.

These cases share a common threads: They are about people who have been adversely affected by market price adjustments. They are about up-ended lives that have had to endure sudden and often devastating changes wrought by an extremely fluid economic environment. They reflect desperate and disagreeable market choices reasonable people would not make under ordinary circumstances.