Should everything be up for sale?
from David Ruccio
In discussing markets with my students, I often invite them to engage in the following thought experiment: “Suppose that body parts—livers, hearts, legs, arms, etc.—are bought and sold on markets.” Their usual response is that body parts shouldn’t be available on markets. “But why draw the line there? Why prohibit the buying and selling of body parts but allow markets for food—when people are dying of hunger and malnutrition—and shelter—when so many are homeless—and healthcare—when so many suffer from poor health or disease?” And then, of course, I remind that body parts are for sale, both legally and illegally, from surrogate mothers and human guinea pigs in drug-safety trials to blood, kidneys, and plastinates.
Michael Sandel raises similar questions in arguing that, in recent decades, we’ve made the transition from a market economy to a market society. And he has his own favorite examples, such as the following:
• A prison-cell upgrade: $90 a night. In Santa Ana, California, and some other cities, nonviolent offenders can pay for a clean, quiet jail cell, without any non-paying prisoners to disturb them.
• The right to shoot an endangered black rhino: $250,000. South Africa has begun letting some 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.
• Your doctor’s cellphone number: $1,500 and up per year. A growing number of “concierge” doctors offer cellphone access and same-day appointments for patients willing to pay annual fees ranging from $1,500 to $25,000.
• Stand in line overnight on Capitol Hill to hold a place for a lobbyist who wants to attend a congressional hearing: $15–$20 an hour. Lobbyists pay line-standing companies, who hire homeless people and others to queue up.
• If you are a second-grader in an underachieving Dallas school, read a book: $2. To encourage reading, schools pay kids for each book they read.
His view is that, while mainstream economists often assume that “markets are inert, that they do not affect the goods being exchanged,” market values often “crowd out nonmarket values worth caring about.”
I think he’s right: commodification does change the nature of goods and services—the way we think about them and what we do with them. Markets do leave their mark.
The only problem with Sandel’s moralistic approach to markets (whereby “some of the good things in life are degraded if turned into commodities”) is that he treats markets in an abstract fashion, as if there were a simple choice between markets and non-markets. What he doesn’t want to consider is the existence of different kinds of markets: slave markets, capitalist markets, communist markets, and so on. In other words, the different consequences of markets depend, at least in part, on how the commodities are produced.
And while he’s quite willing to argue that “slavery was appalling because it treated human beings as a commodity, to be bought and sold at auction,” he never raises a question about the buying and selling of labor power. In other words, he presumes we all know that human chattel, the buying and selling of human beings, is morally wrong but he doesn’t touch on a key ingredient of market society: the fact that large numbers of human beings are forced to have the freedom to sell their ability to work for a wage.
If he did, he’d have to go back in time, before the most recent period of market triumphalism, and discuss the history of the so-called primitive accumulation, when the conditions of market society were first produced.
Sandel is worried that we are currently “moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale.” What he seems not to understand is that the making of market society cannot be separated from the birth and development of capitalism.
The foundation here concerns the “philosophical” dilemma between moral relativism and a Harvard notion of civilized standards in an upper class consciousness. The question of a price on everything is essentially realized in every war zone and Harvard may play war games but they live far from them. The blood money spent to compensate the families that had members murdered is not outside of the question. Markets are about transactions, profits are about personal advantages and there are intrinsic contradictions to the two ideas of community (society) and markets. The one is connected and sustains blood relations …the other places a value on destroying those connections (along with the dignities and identities that are part of humane relations; lost when reduced to human transactions as the core value for inter-subjective foundation itself).
“What he seems not to understand is that the making of market society cannot be separated from the birth and development of capitalism.”
Birth of capitalism? Humans have been practicing capitalism long long before it was “Invented” – any one that has ever owned/possessed that was used for future benefit or survival was practicing a form of capitalism. Even before hard currencies were invented there was capitalism in a real sense.
There are many critters in the world that practice some form of capitalism and many that sell their labor for a living. Parasites AND Symbiotic relationships and some that are hit and miss with exchanges. There is nothing new under this sun but humans want to think they are the inventors of everything and argue about the inventions and morality there of. Humans invented Anthropomorphism to protect their own self-image. Lions mate with Lions and bugs do it their way and humans theirs but under the sun there are just variations and adaptions and modifications.
When we begin to understand this it WILL be a breakthrough and we can figure out maybe how to control our wars which are adaptions and modifications of natures way of breeding for development – anyone doing real world plant hybridization knows this and the value of the Mutt or Wild varieties in producing new variations – for both invention/selection of new traits or a means to help those adapt and survive.
Economics and historians and philosophers need to take notice and to look at how various complex adaptive agents play the game in the environment they inherit and far from equilibrium.
@ joe magner: I appreciate what you are building (as I read into your intentions…?), and the systems capacity of an ecological model is without doubt the true “Market Nature = Mother Nature” best of ll worlds. Unfortunately. as I have grown to accept it, the political will actually looks to exploit distress in the environment and thrives upon chaos and crisis. Ultimately it is concerned more with political economic supremacy over the next 50 years and more than it is concerned with the fall out for the rest of the globe. Like it or not, we are dealing with a 1% power structure that call the moves and make the deals…ultimately shaping and “market conditioning” the demographics they exploit, command and coercively control. I wish, like you do, that it all was truly “rational” but alas…that too is a myth.
On a secondary note, if we are considering the construct of a (rationalistic) market society, we should consider that while that “market” differential may establish both human and transactional values (wealth & worth), it does so on the basis of a social displacement of actual human relations. While the wealthy may live in (market) selected locations of preferential living standards. And these ideally selected locations manage to establish privileged economic supply distributions as well as specialized production markets all around them in elite sanctuaries. These buffered “market societies” are actually floats that live off the bloat they churn from the more widespread average economies. These “average” localized economies are market dependent but also include the disenfranchised and the displaced individuals that do not get to choose where they live…in fact mostly have to settle for what is possible for them at differential levels of either relative comfort or pain.
This creates a need for a tension and a polarity that demands some degree of a market socialism and state suspended scaffolding to support it. So far from a “market society” (as ideally perceived from the vantage point of someone that afford the luxury and cost of maintaining space and a living environment), the transition has not been from a market economy to a transaction based market society. Instead it has become a blind network from undifferentiated to differentiated market economies towards specialized enclaves and niche “social” markets that sustain an agglomerated tier of managed seclusion from the haphazard world that is dependent upon levels of transactions that are institutionalized and protected politically and by “other” means when necessary.
You can’t call anything a “Market Society” when essential transactions that sustain such a dream world are not available to the vast majority of the society…or the economy. Ultimately the pure “market economy” is just a euphemism for the “ownership society.” It exists in the gold standard virtual reality of pure privatization capital control capture is just a glossy version of “managerialism” and the silo perspectives of well healed professional society.
Finally, the question will arrive as to what precisely is “being bought” in terms of social structures of the new reality. From what I see the transition is regressive towards suppression and contraction…not a market transaction utopia. In fact, the levels of security being uniformed at every level is changing markets and market costs as well as access on almost a daily basis. So when we take our head out of the Greek clouds we end up with a process that is electronically marketed and based upon greater and greater levels of market security (and divisive securities that “tranche” the very structure of society itself).
Not sure so much it’s a marketized as a monetized society – verything looked at through the prism of its putative monetary worth. Even if legs are not for sale, the questions are asked in terms of “what that’s worth in money”. You see it all the time (for example “ocean ecosystem services worth $x trillion”). I think this is a fairly new thing, although it may have older beginnings.
The way to highlight the limits of this approach is to ask people what their death is worth (not their life, because they will always think of other people’s lives). How much would they pay not to be dead? The answer is either everything or nothing, because money does not mean anything to the dead.
I agree that there are consequences of commodification that are morally wrong, but don’t believe in solutions that try to define arbitrary qualitative boundaries: This exchange good, that bad. We need to look either at the origin or at the outcome of the market to prevent the outcomes that we don’t like.
At the origin of markets is the need of participants to trade. If participants have broadly equal need to trade, such as both to profit, both to survive, both to mate and raise a child, then the market is fair and should not be tampered with. If the participants enter the market under unequal coercion, the market favors the party who is most free and protection is necessary: slave/owner, landless peasant/landlord, trafficked person/client, prisoner/enforcer.
Looking at the outcome of the market you have to ask what sort of concentration of power results, or can be predicted, after the market runs for a while. Rich people being able to afford fines? Employers controlling the terms of labor? Private health crowding out public health? These bad outcomes need to be dealt with directly, either by progressive taxation or by taking the good off market pricing (minimum wage, non-monetary penalties, etc).
One case where I do agree with the arbitrary moral boundaries, though, is when it comes to enforcement. When a contract is about goods and money, the state can rightly enforce it. When it’s about sex, children, or other intimate things people can very well make deals but it would be wrong for the state to enforce them. What about evictions or denying health care? I think these are grey areas.
How about water rights and market command? In Texas there is a current situation where rice farmers are being rationed out of business because a resort area that flushes demand into revenue is getting prioritized. In the same area residential water supply is being seriously rationed while big business has been exhausting supplies bottling the water for outside markets and revenue streams are everywhere more valuable than survival streams.
Take your pick of the issues from fracking to coal shale conversion and pipelines the water supply is expendable when up against the “lucrative” revenue stream.
The question is not about value on markets it is about control of value on the markets and regimes of beneficiaries that grow path dependent upon exploiting necessities and capturing public markets under capital domains of private advantage. Of course if I say it is about the spectrum of qualifying and reining in “privatization” and “monetarization” then it becomes a systemic question that is immediately firewalled under a “market polity” that is truly the monopoly of power distribution in the contemporary world of wheeler-dealer schemers, realists, rationalists and dreamers that interpolate the narrative for the supporting academic stringers that go along.
If we move to commodification of everything we diminish the value of things too. For example by econojmists and MBAs referring to people as “Resources” we can then lay them off without evoking the frame in our heads about the hurt we are causing to the working persion and his/her family.
An excellent book worth reading in connection with this post is _The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life_. The author, Barry Schwartz, teaches psychology at Swarthmore.