The Moral Limits of Markets'
by Michael J. Sandel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pp., $27
Michael Sandel, a Harvard University professor, teaches one of the most popular college classes at the university and, perhaps, the world. His legendary "Justice" class has been taken by 15,000 graduate students over the years, serialized on PBS, translated into a variety of foreign languages and viewed by literally millions of viewers. His classes sparked a moral philosophy craze in Japan, and he was named by China Newsweek as the "most influential foreign figure." It's quite an accomplishment for a mere political philosophy professor.
His new book, "What Money Can't Buy," explores the consequences and implications for the ever-increasing expansion of markets and market-based reasoning in our society. "The problem with our politics," he writes, "is not too much moral argument but too little. ... A debate about the moral limits of markets would enable us to decide, as a society, where markets serve the public good and where they don't belong."
Modern economists routinely describe the world as a series of incentives and rewards, ever seeking to expand the explanatory power of the metaphor but without accounting for the transformative power of putting a price tag on everything, particularly in an economy with such widely disparate wealth distribution. Simply put, Sandel argues, reducing human behavior to market-based reasoning crowds out public spirit, moral obligation and similarly noneconomic factors. And some of his examples are compelling.
In Switzerland, for example, public-opinion surveys measured public opinion in a small town selected for a nuclear-waste repository. A slim 51 percent majority accepted the placement, apparently in a display of civic responsibility. But the same survey asked the same voters if their support would increase or decrease if coupled with an annual payment to each resident in exchange for placing the waste repository. The result? Support went sharply down not up. Only 25 percent would support it with the payment. An economist would be confounded, but not Sandel: Once you introduce the market, it crowds out and displaces what was, until then, a civic duty.
A second example is even more telling. When day-care centers introduced a "late fee" for parents arriving after closing time to pick up their children, the result was more parents arriving late, rather than fewer. Why? Because parents understood the penalty as a fee for service, which stripped the sense of moral duty out of the equation.
Sandel's point is that markets leave a mark, changing the way we look at the world. "Once we see that markets and commerce change the character of the goods they touch, we have to ask where markets belong — and where they don't. And we can't answer this question without deliberating about the meaning and purpose of the goods, and the values that should govern them." In a world in which ads are sold on school programs, police cars feature Daytona-style advertisements and cities routinely sell naming rights to civic ballparks, city parks and public spaces, Sandel's book raises important questions.
Sandel's best-selling book "Justice" provided a whirlwind tour through moral philosophy. "What Money Can't Buy" is a superb follow-up asking many of the same questions. A baseball stadium where the wealthy sit next to the working class and the variation between ticket prices is minimal is a very different place (with very different civic consequences) from one where the rich peer down from richly appointed "suites" and the less fortunate sit across the stadium in distant bleachers.
There is no more fundamental question we face than how to best preserve the common good and build strong communities that benefit everyone. Sandel's book is an excellent starting place for that dialogue.
