What Money Can't Buy
Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we allow corporations to pay for the right to pollute the atmosphere? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars? Auctioning admission to elite universities? Selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In this book the author takes on one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Is there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life including medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, the author argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be? What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets don't honor and that money can't buy?
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- Michael Sandel's "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets" covers it quite well.
Markets create unfairness by systematically disadvantaging the poor when money becomes necessary to obtain certain goods or quality of goods. Market values corrupt non-market spheres by changing the meaning and value of goods being exchanged (e.g., paying for grades undermines intrinsic desire to learn). Monetary incentives crowd out altruistic motivations and civic duty (e.g., fines becoming fees people willingly pay rather than norms to uphold). Commodification degrades human dignity (e.g., treating drug-addicted women as "baby-making machines" in sterilization-for-cash programs). Markets increase wealth inequality and create segregation in previously egalitarian spaces (e.g., luxury skyboxes in sports stadiums). Market exchanges under severe inequality or economic necessity become coercive, not truly voluntary. Purchased tokens of friendship and personal expressions (apologies, wedding toasts) lose their authenticity and dilute social bonds. Wealthy individuals and countries can pay their way out of moral obligations (e.g., carbon offsets instead of reducing emissions). Markets have infiltrated areas traditionally governed by ethical considerations - medicine, education, personal relationships - without public debate about whether this is desirable. The economic approach treats everything in an ethical vacuum, ignoring morality in favor of purely analyzing incentives.
- It's a fundamental failure of capitalism and market economics that caring professions (such as nursing and teaching) will inherently be underpaid and undervalued. There's a pretty good discussion of this in What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374533652/donhosek
- Books I liked in 2018:
Crashed by Adam Tooze ; history of the financial crisis, goes into more detail than most of the others
The Future of Capitalism by Paul Collier; lots of ideas on how to improve our situation, most of them are good, UK focused
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou; if you've ever been in a startup you'll recognize bits of this story, but it quickly gets out of control in novel ways. Astonishing story.
What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michel Sandel
The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu
Who we are and how we got here by David Reich: ancient DNA and human history
The Book of Why by Judea Pearl; liked it but I need to reread this one a few more times to comprehend completely or go to his textbooks
Empire of Cotton: Sven Birckets; a history of the first global technology including how it made the UK & USA rich
The Away Game: The Epic Search for Soccer's Next Superstar by Sebastian Abbot
- This looks like as good of a dumping ground as any for my pet issue. If you're interested in economic schools besides Neo-Classical there is a class on Coursera called Introduction to Economic Theories.
If you're interested in critiques of contemporary economic thought then I would say Ha-Joon Chang isn't your best option. I think the thing to do is to mostly ditch economists as they aren't that great of critics (aside from a few Post-Keynesians but that's my own personal bias) and look to the philosophers.
Here's a critique by Martha Nussbaum that I find pretty convincing: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
Michael Sandel has a video series on INET called What Money Can't Buy based off his book. It's easy to watch and it's basically him prodding at some of the philosophical assumptions made in our usual economic reasoning. I find it quite good and it does have big name economists like Mankiw on it.
Elizabeth Anderson is good as well and she seems to be more than happy to appear on libertarian programs.
Here she is on econtalk: http://www.econtalk.org/elizabeth-anderson-on-worker-rights-...
on Libertarianism.org:
1. https://www.libertarianism.org/media/free-thoughts-podcast/e...
2. https://www.libertarianism.org/media/free-thoughts/do-employ...
And with Mike Munger: http://www.publicsquare.net/2017/11/private-government-how-e...
There's some sociologists that are also critical of the standard economic reasoning but I don't know enough about that side of the issue to provide any recommendations.
- This is great analysis. My opposition to using drugs follows that logic: by using them, you are implicitly supporting the predatory system.
Your mention of "market" in that way makes me think of viaticals[1], where the life insurance policies of people near death are bought for a profit. In a way, the people who now own the policies have an interest in the death of the other.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viatical_settlement. A great book on this subject and how the prevalence of markets has degraded norms is What Money Can't Buy by Michael Sandel (http://www.amazon.com/What-Money-Cant-Buy-Markets/dp/0374203...).
- You don't really need to blame someone, but if your life capital depends on hacks like that, then it's a sad life.
Tangentially, Michael Sandel's "What money can't buy" is a good book about the morals of markets:
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