[PDF]What Money Can't Buy

Author of the
New York Times


bestseller Justice


SANDEL


MICHAEL). SANDEL
What Money Can’t Buy
The Moral Limits of M arkets


2012


| ALLEN LANE an imprint of PENGUIN BOOK


Contents


Introduction: Markets and Morals Market Triumphalism Everything for Sale The Role of Markets
Our Rancorous Politics


1. Jumping the Queue Airports, A musement Parks, Car Pool Lanes Hired Line Standers Ticket
Scalpers Concierge Doctors Markets Versus Queues Yosemite Campsites Papal Masses
Springsteen Concerts


2. Incentives Cash for Sterilization The Economic Approach to Life Paying Kids for Good Grades
Bribes to Lose Weight Selling the Right to Immigrate A Market in Refugees Speeding Tickets and
Subway Cheats Tradable Procreation Permits Tradable Pollution Permits Carbon Offsets Paying to
Kill an Endangered Rhino Ethics and Economics


3. How Markets Crowd Out Morals Hired Friends Bought Apologies and Wedding Toasts The Case
Against Gifts Auctioning College Admission Coercion and Corruption Nuclear Waste Sites Donation
Days and Day-Care Pickups Blood for Sale Economizing Love


4. Markets in Life and Death Janitors Insurance Betting on Death Internet Death Pools Insurance
Versus Gambling The Terrorism Futures Market The Lives of Strangers Death Bonds


5. Naming Rights Autographs for Sale Corporate-Sponsored Home Runs Luxury Skyboxes
Moneyball Bathroom Advertising Ads in Books Body Billboards Branding the Public Square
Branded Lifeguards and Nature Trails Police Cars and Fire Hydrants Commercials in the Classroom


Introduction: Markets and Morals


There are some things money can’t buy, but these days, not many. Today, almost everything
is up for sale. Here are a few examples:


A prison cell upgrade: $82 per night. In Santa Ana, California, and some other cities, nonviolent offenders can pay
for better accommodations—a clean, quiet jail cell, away from the cells for nonpaying prisoners.1


Access to the car pool lane while driving solo: $8 during rush hour. Minneapolis and other cities are trying to ease
traffic congestion by letting solo drivers pay to drive in car pool lanes, at rates that vary according to traffic.2


The services of an Indian surrogate mother to carry a pregnancy: $6,250. Western couples seeking surrogates
increasingly outsource the job to India, where the practice is legal and the price is less than one-third the going
rate in the United States.3


The right to immigrate to the United States: $500,000. Foreigners who invest $500,000 and create at least ten
jobs in an area of high unemployment are eligible for a green card that entitles them to permanent residency.4


The right to shoot an endangered black rhino: $150,000. South Africa has begun letting ranchers sell hunters the
right to kill a limited number of rhinos, to give the ranchers an incentive to raise and protect the endangered
species.5


The cell phone number of your doctor: $1,500 and up per year. A growing number of “concierge” doctors offer
cell phone access and same-day appointments for patients willing to pay annual fees ranging from $1,500 to
$25,000.6


The right to emit a metric ton of carbon into the atmosphere: €13 (about $18). The European Union runs a
carbon emissions market that enables companies to buy and sell the right to pollute.7


Admission of your child to a prestigious university: ? Although the price is not posted, officials from some top
universities told The Wall Street Journal that they accept some less than stellar students whose parents are
wealthy and likely to make substantial financial contributions.8


Not everyone can afford to buy these things. But today there are lots of new ways to make
money. If you need to earn some extra cash,here are some novel possibilities:


Rent out space on your forehead (or elsewhere on your body) to display commercial advertising: $777. Air New
Zealand hired thirty people to shave their heads and wear temporary tattoos with the slogan “Need a change?
Head down to New Zealand.”9


Serve as a human guinea pig in a drug safety trial for a pharmaceutical company: $7,500. The pay can be higher
or lower, depending on the invasiveness of the procedure used to test the drug's effect, and the discomfort
involved.10


Fight in Somalia or Afghanistan for a private military company: $250 per month to $1,000 per day. The pay varies
according to qualifications, experience, and nationality.11


Stand in line overnight on Capitol Hill to hold a place for a lobbyist who wants to attend a congressional hearing:
$15-$20 per hour. The lobbyists pay line-standing companies, who hire homeless people and others to queue
up.12


If you are a second grader in an underachieving Dallas school, read a book: $2. To encourage reading, the schools
pay kids for each book they read.13


If you are obese, lose fourteen pounds in four months: $378. Companies and health insurers offer financial
incentives for weight loss and other kinds of healthy behavior.14


Buy the life insurance policy of an ailing or elderly person, pay the annual premiums while the person is alive,
and then collect the death benefit when he or she dies: potentially, millions (depending on the policy). This form
of betting on the lives of strangers has become a $30 billion industry. The sooner the stranger dies, the more the
investor makes. 15


We live at a time when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three
decades, markets—and market values—have come to govern our lives as never before. We
did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon
US.

As the cold war ended, markets and market thinking enjoyed unrivaled prestige,
understandably so. No other mechanism for organizing the production and distribution of
goods had proved as successful at generating affluence and prosperity. And yet, even as
growing numbers of countries around the world embraced market mechanisms

in the operation of their economies, something else was happening. Market values were
coming to play a greater and greater role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial
domain. Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone but


increasingly governs the whole of life. It is time to ask whether we want to live this way.
THE ERA OF MARKET TRIUM PHALISM


The years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 were a heady time of market faith and
deregulation—an era of market triumphalism. The era began in the early 1980s, when Ronald
Reagan and Margaret Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not government,
held the key to prosperity and freedom. And it continued in the 1990s, with the market-
friendly liberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith
that markets are the primary means for achieving the public good.

Today, that faith is in doubt. The era of market triumphalism has come to an end. The
financial crisis did more than cast doubt on the ability of markets to allocate risk efficiently. It
also prompted a widespread sense that markets have become detached from morals and that
we need somehow to reconnect them. But it’s not obvious what this would mean, or how we
should go about it.

Some say the moral failing at the heart of market triumphalism was greed, which led to
irresponsible risk taking. The solution, according to this view, is to rein in greed, insist on
greater integrity and responsibility among bankers and Wall Street executives, and enact
sensible regulations to prevent a similar crisis from happening again.

This is, at best, a partial diagnosis. While it is certainly true that greed played a role in the
financial crisis, something bigger is at stake. The most fateful change that unfolded during the
past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of
market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.

To contend with this condition, we need to do more than inveigh against greed; we need to
rethink the role that markets should play in our society. We need a public debate about what
it means to keep markets in their place. To have this debate, we need to think through the
moral limits of markets. We need to ask whether there are some things money should not
buy.

The reach of markets, and market-oriented thinking, into aspects of life traditionally
governed by nonmarket norms is one of the most significant developments of our time.

Consider the proliferation of for-profit schools, hospitals, and prisons, and the outsourcing
of war to private military contractors. (In Iraq and Afghanistan, private contractors actually
outnumbered U.S. military troops.

1677)

Consider the eclipse of public police forces by private security firms—especially in the
United States and Britain, where the number of private guards is more than twice the number
of public police officers.


1770r consider the pharmaceutical companies’ aggressive marketing of prescription drugs
to consumers in rich countries. (If you’ve ever seen the television commercials on the evening
news in the United States, you could be forgiven for thinking that the greatest health crisis in
the world is not malaria or river blindness or sleeping sickness, but a rampant epidemic of
erectile dysfunction.)

Consider too the reach of commercial advertising into public

schools; the sale of “naming rights” to parks and civic spaces; the marketing of “designer”
eggs and sperm for assisted reproduction; the outsourcing of pregnancy to surrogate mothers
in the developing world; the buying and selling, by companies and countries, of the right to
pollute; a system of campaign finance that comes close to permitting the buying and selling of
elections.

These uses of markets to allocate health, education, public safety, national security,
criminal justice, environmental protection, recreation, procreation, and other social goods


were for the most part unheard of thirty years ago. Today, we take them largely for granted.
EVERYTHING FOR SALE


Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale?

For two reasons: one is about inequality; the other is about corruption. Consider inequality.
In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more
money can buy, the more affluence (or the lack of it) matters.

If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to buy yachts, sports cars, and fancy
vacations, inequalities of income and wealth would not matter very much. But as money
comes to buy more and more—political influence, good medical care, a home in a safe
neighborhood rather than a crime-ridden one, access to elite schools rather than failing
ones—the distribution of income and wealth looms larger and larger. Where all good things
are bought and sold, having money makes all the difference in the world.

This explains why the last few decades have been especially hard on poor and middle-class
families. Not only has the gap between

rich and poor widened, the commodification of everything has sharpened the sting of
inequality by making money matter more.

The second reason we should hesitate to put everything up for sale is more difficult to
describe. It is not about inequality and fairness but about the corrosive tendency of markets.
Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only
allocate goods; they also express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being
exchanged. 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. Auctioning seats in the
freshman class to the highest bidders might raise revenue but also erode the integrity of the
college and the value of its diploma. Hiring foreign mercenaries to fight our wars might spare
the lives of our citizens but corrupt the meaning of citizenship.

Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not affect the goods they
exchange. But this is untrue. Markets leave their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out
nonmarket values worth caring about.

Of course, people disagree about what values are worth caring about, and why. So to
decide what money should—and should not—be able to buy, we have to decide what values
should govern the various domains of social and civic life. How to think this through is the
subject of this book.


Here is a preview of the answer | hope to offer: 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, as instruments of profit and use. But not all goods are properly valued in this
way.

1? The most obvious example is human beings. Slavery was appalling because it treated
human beings as commodities, to be bought and sold at auction. Such treatment fails to value
human beings in

the appropriate way—as persons worthy of dignity and respect, rather than as instruments
of gain and objects of use.

Something similar can be said of other cherished goods and practices. We don’t allow
children to be bought and sold on the market. Even if buyers did not mistreat the children
they purchased, a market in children would express and promote the wrong way of valuing
them. Children are not properly regarded as consumer goods but as beings worthy of love
and care. Or consider the rights and obligations of citizenship. If you are called to jury duty,
you may not hire a substitute to take your place. Nor do we allow citizens to sell their votes,
even though others might be eager to buy them. Why not? Because we believe that civic
duties should not be regarded as private property but should be viewed instead as public
responsibilities. To outsource them is to demean them, to value them in the wrong way.

These examples illustrate a broader point: some of the good things in life are corrupted or
degraded if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where it
should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question—health,
education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political
questions, not merely economic ones. To resolve them, we have to debate, case by case, the
moral meaning of these goods and the proper way of valuing them.

This is a debate we didn’t have during the era of market triumphalism. As a result, without
quite realizing it, without ever deciding to do so, we drifted from having a market economy
to being a market society.

The difference is this: A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for
organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep
into every aspect of

human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the
market.

The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the role and reach of markets.
Do we want a market economy, or a market society? What role should markets play in public
life and personal relations? How can we decide which goods should be bought and sold, and
which should be governed by nonmarket values? Where should money’s writ not run?
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