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Virtue Does Not Just Survive the Marketplace, It Thrives
A Discussion of Choi and Storr’s “Can Trust, Reciprocity and Friendship Survive?”
Attacking capitalism and marketplace activity is commonplace, often with no social pushback.
With little effort, I found this list of 10 shows that criticize capitalism. The few I am familiar with do in fact live up to that description.
Choi and Storr easily list many such critiques in the social science literature as well. Reaching back to 1899 with Thorstein Veblen’s critique of conspicuous consumption and the resulting moral deterioration, he may be the first to have done so with a wide audience. (p. 218)
He was certainly not the last. Choi and Storr of course reference Karl Marx who thought capitalism would fail on its own immoral weight. (p. 218)
And they cite many other papers that they say claim that the market activity in capitalism would “hurt altruism and and cooperation, and have unintended adverse effects on social norms and informal institutions.” (p. 218)
Implied in these criticisms is often an unspoken assumption of “separate spheres” or “hostile worlds” that makes society and the economy distinct from each other.
The separate spheres view holds that the two arenas of social life, one characterized by…
