According to Michael Sandel, the "most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed" but the expansion of market values into spheres of life where they don't belong. In this well-argued and important book, he draws our attention to the moral limits of markets, and asks the simple question: Are there some things money should not buy? That this question needs asking points up how far markets, and market values, have come to govern our lives.
At the end of the cold war, "markets and market thinking enjoyed unrivaled prestige, understandably so." Sandel admires market capitalism as the mechanism for organizing the production and distribution of goods that has proved most "successful at generating affluence and prosperity." However, he takes issue with the ideological assumption that markets are always the best way of getting goods to those who value them most highly. Although a line of Russian housewives queuing for bread came to epitomize the failure of centralized planning, queues may sometimes work better than markets in maximizing the enjoyment of certain goods. Sandel would probably agree that a free market is the best way of getting bread to consumers, but in other situations queues may do a better job. In any given case, it's "an empirical question, not a matter that can be resolved in advance by abstract economic reasoning."
Markets now "allocate health, education, public safety, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, recreation, procreation, and other social goods". It's a long list, and perhaps more surprising to British than to American readers. Out-and-out free marketers might be celebrating the fact that we "live at a time when when almost everything can be bought and sold" but the rest of us will be uneasy. Sandel offers two reasons why we should be worried.
First, the more money can buy, the more affluence (or the lack of it) matters. Second, putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. Inequality increases as more good things are bought and sold: there is not just the usual inequality between rich and poor, now there is a greater range of goods out of reach of the poor. More difficult to grasp, perhaps because we are already so far gone down the market route, is the idea that markets corrupt, because they not only allocate goods, "they also express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged."
One of the examples Sandel gives is of kids at an underachieving Dallas school being paid for each book they read. "Paying kids to read books might get them to read more, but also teach them to regard reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction." In their examination of how capitalism enlarges insatiability by increasingly "monetizing" the economy (How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life), the Skidelskys contrast leisure with work, where their sense of leisure is distinguished by an absence of external compulsion. All three authors are concerned with the role of money and markets in achieving - or scuppering - the good life. For Sandel in particular, how we decide what money should, and should not, be able to buy is the key moral question. To this end, we must "decide what values should govern the various domains of social and civic life." Sandel succeeds in this book by enabling us to think this issue through, and by keeping it clearly in view without getting bogged in jargon or abstruse argument.
The phenomenon of "skyboxification" - where luxury boxes segregate rich and poor in modern sports arenas - is for Sandel the epitome of the way in which "commercialism erodes commonality." After a long period when "ballparks were places where corporate executives sat side by side with blue-collar workers" it seems we're returning to an earlier epoch, when senators kept themselves apart from the plebs in the Roman theatre (one difference being that, instead of being high above the field of play, the senators of ancient Rome were nearest the action).
Sandel acknowledges that commercialism does not destroy everything it touches. There were naysayers when Blues musicians plugged in their guitars: it was like putting a dollar sign on it, but who would begrudge John Lee Hooker from earning a living? A clearer example of price driving out value is the way the rich avoid queuing for free tickets for Shakespeare in the Park. Those who can afford to employ a line-standing company are not always those who will most highly value the experience. (Shakespeare himself illustrated opposing attitudes to market values in The Merchant of Venice, in which Antonio demands of Shylock: when did friendship take "A breed for barren metal of his friend?" Shylock later admits: "To buy his favour, I extend this friendship".)
When we decide that certain goods may be bought and sold, "we decide, at least implicitly, that it is appropriate to treat them as commodities". However, not all goods are properly valued in this way. The most obvious example, at least to the modern reader, is human beings: slavery was appalling "because it treated human beings as commodities, to be bought and sold at auction." Today, no country could claim to be civilized if it condoned human trafficking, and this example shows most clearly that, in the end, "the question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together." Democracy may not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life. Insofar as markets undermine commonality and diminish the public character of our common world, they undermine democracy. In Sandel's home country, this would be the very definition of an unAmerican activity.
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 January 2018
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 July 2013
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Adilson Rodrigues PiresReviewed in Brazil on 4 October 2021
Até que ponto a ética e a moral podem limitar os lucros?
- CPReviewed in Canada on 5 December 2020
Values and moral principles vs market efficiency
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Simon RotelliReviewed in Italy on 18 September 2019
L'ho regalato a mia figlia grande, quindi 5 stelle per me!
