The Price of a Thing Was Once Public

For several centuries in England it was a crime to buy goods before they reached the market. It was a separate crime to buy them in the market and resell them there at a higher price, and a third to corner the supply of a commodity. The offences were called forestalling, regrating, and engrossing, and they were prosecuted in ordinary courts against ordinary traders. The purpose was not kindness toward buyers. It was to force every transaction into a place where other people could see the price.

Trade had to happen where it could be seen

The medieval market was a legal institution before it was a commercial one, and most of its rules were about visibility. A market existed because a charter said it did, on named days, within a defined space, during daylight hours. Buying and selling outside those bounds was not merely unusual. It was actionable.

The reasoning is easier to see from the offences than from the charters. Forestalling meant intercepting goods on the road before they arrived, which denied the market the chance to price them. Regrating meant buying up supply and reselling it in the same market at a markup, which manufactured scarcity in front of the people affected by it. Engrossing meant accumulating enough of a commodity to set its price alone. All three describe the same underlying act: removing a transaction from public view, or removing the conditions under which a public price could form.

A price arrived at in the open does something a private price cannot. Everyone who watches it form learns what the thing is worth, and that knowledge is not consumed by being shared. The buyer who was not present still benefits, because the seller knows the buyer could have been. The market square was an information system, and the rules against private dealing were there to keep it from being drained.

The state was willing to publish a price itself

Where the stakes were high enough, the price was not merely public. It was posted. The Assize of Bread and Ale, dating to the reign of Henry III in the thirteenth century and in force in some form for the better part of six hundred years, tied the price and weight of a loaf to the prevailing price of grain by a published formula. A baker did not negotiate. The assize was calculated, the loaf was weighed, and selling underweight brought penalties.

This is a striking thing to sit with. The most basic commodity in the economy had its price set by a public rule that anyone could check, and enforcement fell on the seller rather than on the buyer's ability to haggle. Whatever else that system got wrong, and it got a great deal wrong, it treated the price of bread as a fact the public was entitled to know.

Wages were treated the same way, and for less admirable reasons. After the plague of the mid fourteenth century killed a large share of the working population, surviving labourers found their work suddenly scarce and began demanding more for it. The response was the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349 and the Statute of Labourers in 1351, which fixed maximum wages at pre-plague levels, restricted labourers from moving between employers, and required able-bodied people to accept work at the legal rate.

Note precisely what that statute assumed. A wage was a public number, set in public, enforceable in court. The state fixed it against the workers' interest, which is the part worth condemning. But it did not occur to anyone that the number itself might be private. The idea that what a person earns is a confidential matter between them and their employer is not ancient tradition. It is recent, and it arrived without argument.

What a public price actually does

A price formed in the open binds everyone who watched it form. A price formed privately binds nobody. This is the whole mechanism, and it is worth stating carefully because the benefit is usually described in moral terms when it is really an informational one.

When prices are public, every participant knows the distribution. A seller knows what others are getting and will not accept much less. A buyer knows what others are paying and will not offer much more. The bargaining range collapses toward the actual value of the thing, and the time spent discovering it collapses with it. Nobody has to be virtuous for this to work. They only have to be able to see.

When prices are private, the distribution is known to whoever observes many transactions and unknown to whoever observes one. In a labour market that is never symmetric. An employer sees every offer it makes and every offer accepted or refused across dozens or thousands of hires. A worker sees the handful of offers made to them personally across a career. One party holds the distribution. The other holds an anecdote.

Opacity is therefore not friction. It is a transfer. The gap between what someone would have accepted and what they could have got is captured by whoever knows the distribution, and structurally that is almost always the same side. This has nothing to do with anyone's intentions. A perfectly well-meaning employer with good information and a candidate with none will still, on average, settle above the candidate's reservation and below the market, because that is what happens when only one party can see.

The one price we agreed to hide

Almost every price in a modern economy is public. Goods carry price tags. Fares, tariffs, interest rates, and share prices are published continuously. A person can discover the cost of a house, a flight, or a kilogram of anything in seconds.

Compensation is the exception, and the exception is large. It is the single biggest recurring transaction most people ever enter, it determines a large part of their life, and it is conducted with one party discouraged from stating a number and the other holding a distribution.

The mechanisms of concealment are worth naming plainly, because each looks reasonable in isolation. Listings omit the range. Candidates are asked what they currently earn, which anchors the next offer to the last one and propagates any past underpayment forward through a career. Colleagues are discouraged from comparing, sometimes by contract and more often by manners. Each of these individually reads as ordinary professional discretion. Together they reconstruct exactly the conditions that forestalling and regrating were invented to prevent.

What a market substitutes when it cannot see the price

A market deprived of price information does not stop deciding. It decides on whatever else is available, and what is available is worse. This is the part that connects pay opacity to everything else that is wrong with hiring, and it follows directly rather than by analogy.

If an employer cannot observe what a candidate's work is worth in the open market, and a candidate cannot observe what the role pays, both sides reach for proxies. The employer reaches for the institution on the résumé, the brand of the previous employer, the years of tenure, and the last salary. The candidate reaches for rumour and for whatever a friend disclosed. None of these measure value. All of them measure history.

That substitution has a distributional consequence that is entirely predictable. Proxies based on history reproduce history. Anchoring an offer to a previous salary guarantees that whoever was underpaid once will be underpaid again, and compounds it. Weighting an institution's name transfers advantage to whoever had access to the institution. A market that cannot see price does not become neutral. It becomes a machine for propagating whatever was already true.

The objection, taken seriously

The strongest argument against public pay is that work is not bread. A loaf is interchangeable and its price can be published because every loaf is the same loaf. Two people with identical titles may differ enormously in what they actually contribute, and a published number invites resentment between colleagues whose differences are real but hard to articulate.

That objection is genuine and should not be waved off. It is also an argument for publishing ranges rather than for publishing nothing, and it proves less than it appears to. Every market with heterogeneous goods faces the same problem and solves it the same way, by publishing ranges, grades, and comparables rather than a single number. Houses differ more than jobs do, and property prices are public. The difficulty of pricing a thing precisely has never been treated, anywhere else, as a reason to conceal what it sold for.

The second objection is that transparency compresses pay downward, since employers who must publish will publish conservatively. This is a real risk and the honest answer is that it depends on which side the information asymmetry was favouring, which is an empirical question and not a settled one. What is not in doubt is who currently holds the distribution, and any argument that the uninformed party is protected by remaining uninformed deserves more suspicion than it usually receives.

Where this leaves the question

The medieval market was not a good system. It was coercive, it restricted movement, it fixed wages against the people earning them, and the Statute of Labourers in particular was an instrument for suppressing exactly the bargaining power that scarcity had handed to workers. Nothing here is nostalgia for it.

The point is narrower and harder to dismiss. That system understood something which has since been forgotten, which is that a price is information, that information formed in public benefits everyone who can see it, and that the private transaction is the anomaly requiring justification rather than the default. It cared enough about this to make concealment a crime.

We have inverted the arrangement without ever making the case for the inversion. Every price in the economy is public except the one that determines most people's lives, and the arguments for that exception are made almost entirely by the party holding the distribution.

This report was produced by Kariaa Research. All data, resources, and analysis are proprietary. For questions, contact research@kariaa.com.