What Money Can’t Buy
The Moral Limits of Markets
Michael J. Sandel
Having read it
★★★★☆
An interesting read and one that explains how the the marketisation of nearly everything in our lives, even attitudes and ways of working leaves much distance between us all, figuratively and literally.
It seems in our world today, heavily commercialised and monetarily-driven products and services (and attitudes and working practices), that those upholding and espousing the wonders of the market to so say ‘solve’ everything continues to happen, rather than those characters looking beyond their spreadsheets, efficiencies and beliefs want to admit to, otherwise they’d just sell you the cheaper monthly option instead then resell the package the following year under a slightly different banner to show it still works, they’re still relevant, existential issues don’t matter and everything is fine.
Economists often assume that markets do not touch or taint the goods they regulate. But this is untrue. Markets leave their mark on social norms. Often, market incentives erode or crowd out nonmarket incentives.
Four out of five for really just being a collection of five related essays, but five out of five for its point and how it shows society really does need to have a smaller (and better regulated) market and its practices to really and properly empower all, not just the elites.
The market (and its entrapment of quantifying seemingly everything to use data to then prove and justify efficiency, efficacy and productivity) has a lot to answer for with its commoditisation, gamification, competiviness and commercialisation of nearly every aspect of our lives.
Where are the brands that dare to be quieter, humble and not so flipping big while trying to appear, be and do everything?
Oh, and the very market approaches that led to the climate crises we face now allow (even more) expeditions or holidays to be made (from boxes on wheels to get to flying boxes that lead to more boxes on wheels and then eventually a floating box) in and around a rather important and isolated landscape (planet Earth’s seventh continent) that can be now visited by hoi polloi that require less gear, gets an easy snapshot or two, some status among their connections and a smug sense of satisfaction as some of the cost went to a worthwhile organisation to make them feel further entitled and privileged for the so say good they do and the assistance they’ve given a company to further despoil and destroy the planet.
They’ll be an fancy hotel at the top of Everest soon.
A good passage
The problem with our politics is not too much moral argument but too little. Our politics is overheated because it is mostly vacant, empty of moral and spiritual content. It fails to engage with big questions that people care about.
A second good passage
[...] When people are engaged in an activity they consider intrinsically worthwhile, offering them money may weaken their motivation by depreciating or ‘crowding out? their intrinsic interest or commitment.36 Standard economic theory construes all motivations, whatever their character or source, as preferences and assumes they are additive. But this misses the corrosive effect of money.
The crowding-out phenomenon has big implications for economics. It calls into question the use of market mechanisms and market reasoning in many aspects of social life, including financial incentives to motivate performance in education, health care, the workplace, voluntary associations, civic life, and other settings in which intrinsic motivations or moral commitments matter. Bruno Frey (an author of the Swiss nuclear waste siting study) and the economist Reto Jegen summarize the implications as follows: ‘Arguably, the “crowding-out effect” is one of the most important anomalies in economics, as it suggests the opposite of the most fundamental economic ‘law’, that raising monetary incentives increases supply. If the crowding-out effect holds, raising monetary incentives reduces, rather than in-creases, supply.’37
A third good passage
Global action on climate change may require that we find our way to a new environmental ethic, a new set of attitudes toward the natural world we share. Whatever its efficiency, a global market in the right to pollute may make it harder to cultivate the habits of restraint and shared sacrifice that a responsible environmental ethic requires.