Michael Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard and is much heard not just for his oratorical skills but also the ability to involve the audience and their opinions while addressing questions that often stay with us when we go to bed, like: What should be the role of money and markets in our societies? Saying the question of markets is not just an economic question, but more one on how we want to live together, he describes a society where everything is up for sale. And the whiff of nostalgia makes you remember those days when some moral and civic goods were beyond the pale of commerce.
“Today there are few things money cannot buy. If you’re sentenced to a jail term in Santa Barbara, California…if you do not like the standard accommodation, you can buy a prison cell upgrade…for how much do you think? Five hundred dollars? It is not Ritz-Carlton. It’s a jail! Eighty two dollars a night!...,” With that example to top it all Sandel gives us more examples of money being used to buy comfort where in discomfort alone lies the lesson.
“Over the past three decades we have lived through a quiet revolution. We have drifted almost without realising it from having a market economy to becoming market societies. A market economy is a tool for organising productive activity, but a market society is a place where almost everything is up for sale…in which market thinking and market values dominate every aspect of life: personal, family, education, politics, law, civic life…,” says Sandel. This is worrisome because of the inequality it spells. “The more things money can buy, the more affluence or the lack of it matters. If the only thing that money determined was access to yachts or a BMW then inequality would not matter much. But when money comes to increasingly govern access to the essentials of the good life, inequality matters a great deal. The second reason to worry is that when market thinking and values enter, they may change the meaning of social goods and practices and crowd out attitudes and norms worth caring about.”
A case in point: would it be a good idea to give cash incentives to children to make them read a book? The opinion of the house is divided. Sandel reveals, “…it has had mixed results, for the most part has not resulted in higher grades. The two dollars for each book did lead kids to read more books, but also shorter books. But the real question is, what will become of the kids later? Will they have learned that reading is a chore…to be done for pay…or it may lead them to read for the wrong reason initially and then lead them to fall in love with reading for its own sake.”
This is an illustration of that which goes on in a market society. Sandel says that economists think the market is inert, “…they do not touch or taint the goods they exchange…this may be true enough if we are talking about material goods. If you sell me a flat screen television or gift me one, it could mean much the same. But the same may not be true when we are talking of nonmaterial goods such as teaching and learning or engaging together in social life….markets and commerce, when extended beyond the material domain, can change the character of the goods themselves, can change the meaning of social practices, as in the example of teaching and learning… we have to ask where markets belong and where they don’t.”
The point worth taking home is, “…marketizing every aspect of life leads to a condition where those who are affluent and those who are of modest means increasingly live separate lives. We live, work and shop…our children study…in different places. This is not good for democracy…democracy does not require equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life so that they encounter one another in the ordinary course of life…this is what teaches us to negotiate and to abide our differences…and this is how we come to care for the common good.”
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