What Money Can’t Buy: Reflections on Michael Sandel’s Book
“There are things money can’t buy. For everything else there’s Mastercard”. The credit card ads became famous by showing the easiness of spending money nowadays, but with a barrier, which often involved emotional situations. Is this barrier becoming blurry?
According to Sandel, the market principles and logics are invading an increasing number of aspects of social life, corrupting what is being exchanged. This marked the transition from a market economy to a market society. The market is a valid tool for organizing production and an efficient way to allocate resources. These resources, however, need to have an explicit value. This is the assumption for the market to work without altering the value of the goods involved in the transaction. In our market society this assumption is not respected, a price is given to what should not be priced, to what does not have an intrinsic value. Imagine for example buying a television, once you have bought it from the store its value remains the same and it keeps unchanged even when you give it to your best friend as a gift. You can also buy a personalized toast for your best friend wedding nowadays, but would it keep the same value once he discovers that you did not write it? He would totally lose it.
There are cases of exchanges in the market society in which the goods are not essentially corrupted. Blood, for example, has the same value for the receivers, whether the “donor” is paid or not. However, the use of money changes the meaning of the deed, by not being voluntary the generosity aspect involved in the donation is lost. Sandel noticed something interesting regarding the consequence of this loss in meaning caused by the monetary element: the British system of blood donations is more effective than the American one in which you can receive money by giving away blood. This is in contrast with the market principles, why? Maybe because citizens feel corrupted by being paid, they see the blood donation as an act of civic duty. Another noteworthy example is related to the sale of admission to elite universities. The service obtained does not change, but the integrity of the school is consequently corrupted and you are corrupted as well, since you lose the pride deriving from passing the admission process.
Cases like those demonstrate how our decision making process is degenerating and becoming corrupted. We are losing the willingness to make any effort by ourselves, because money makes our life easier. We start relying just on incentives, we act because of the money. In this way we forget more important emotional values that give meaning to our existence, we forget to think about what is good for ourselves and for the others. We forget about ethics and morality. Maybe it happens because it does not exist objectivity in those fields, so we let the market decide.
As a consequence, should market mechanisms be forbidden when they collude with social aspects? It should not be done a priori at least and not generically in specific areas of life. Sometimes, a trade off must be made. An example can clarify this point. In the USA there is the case of a school that pays 2 dollars for each book children reads, to incentivize them to learn. Sandel criticize this practice because it corrupts the natural passion for learning. On the other hand, providing monetary incentive in the field of education can be a solution to inequality, by pushing uneducated people to study more and creating positive spillovers in the society. On the contrary, there are cases in which markets can increase inequality and division in the society. This is a phenomenon defined by Sandel as Skyboxification, that is caused by an increased lack of interaction and understanding between people who have money and those who have not. This can happen when we allow people to pay a premium in order skip queues or even worse when we allow people to market organs.
A public debate that lead to a general understanding and a democratic decision is necessary for each specific case to avoid an increase in corruption. As already mentioned, it is important to consider a trade off between the positive and negative consequences. Sometimes, it is possible to accept a possible corruption of certain values, if there are effects of decreased inequality or benefits for the people and the society in general (e.g. incentives for education and incentives for conducting healthier lifestyle). Sometimes, corruption prevails as in the case of the government giving incentives to citizens to accept specific public policies and sometimes, besides that, skyboxification effects are incurred, such as in the case of university admissions and in the market for organs. As already mentioned, morality and ethics might not be objective, but pros and cons of each case might be. The market cannot be generally considered as the solution to bring us to the public good and cannot substitute decision making.
The scenario mentioned in the last paragraph would be the ideal one. Unfortunately, I believe that money will be able to buy more things that should not buy, but maybe Mastercard ads are not that wrong: there will always be something that is cannot buy, happiness.
