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In an interesting recent book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limitsof the Market, the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel points to the rangeof things that money can buy in modern societies and gentlytries to stoke our outrageat the market’s growing dominance. Is he right that we should be alarmed?
While Sandel worries about the corrupting nature of some monetizedtransactions (do kids really develop a love of reading if they are bribed to read books?), he is also concerned aboutunequal access to money, which makes trades using money inherently unequal.More generally, he fears that the expansion of anonymousmonetary exchange erodes social cohesion,and argues for reducing money’s role in society.
Sandel’s concerns are not entirely new, but his examples are worthreflecting upon. In the United States, some companies pay the unemployed to stand inline for free public tickets to congressional hearings. They then sellthe tickets to lobbyists and corporate lawyers who have a business interest inthe hearing but are too busy to stand in line.
Clearly, public hearings are an important element of participatory democracy. All citizens should haveequal access. So selling access seems to be a perversionof democratic principles.
The fundamental problem, though, is scarcity.We cannot accommodate everyone in the room who might have an interest in aparticularly important hearing. So we have to “sell”entry. We can either allow people to use their time (standing in line)to bid for seats, or we can auction seats for money. The former seems fairer,because all citizens seemingly start with equal endowments of time. But is asingle mother with a high-pressure job and three young children as equallyendowed with spare time as a student on summer vacation? And is society betteroff if she, the chief legal counsel for a large corporation, spends much of hertime standing in line?
Whether it is better to sell entry tickets for time or for money thusdepends on what we hope to achieve. If we want toincrease society’s productive efficiency, people’s willingness to paywith money is a reasonable indicator of how much they will gain if they haveaccess to the hearing. Auctioning seats for money makes sense – the lawyercontributes more to society by preparing briefsthan by standing in line.
On the other hand, if it is important that young, impressionablecitizens see how their democracy works, and that we build social solidarity by making corporate executives stand inline with jobless teenagers, it makes sense to force people to bid with theirtime and to make entry tickets non-transferable.But if we think that both objectives – efficiency and solidarity – should playsome role, perhaps we should turn a blind eye to hiring the unemployed to standin line in lieu of busy lawyers, so long asthey do not corner all of the seats.
What about the sale of human organs, another example Sandel worries about?Something seems wrong when a lung or a kidney is sold for money. Yet wecelebrate the kindness of a stranger who donates a kidney to a young child. So,clearly, it is not the transfer of the organ that outragesus – we do not think that the donor is misinformedabout the value of a kidney or is being fooled into partingwith it. Nor, I think, do we have concerns about the scruples of the person selling the organ – afterall, they are parting irreversibly withsomething that is dear to them for a price that few of us would accept.
I think part of our discomfort has todo with the circumstances in which the transaction takes place. What kind ofsociety do we live in if people have to sell their organs to survive?
But, while a ban on organ sales may make us feel better, does it reallymake society better off? Possibly, if it makes society work harder to ensurethat people are never driven to the circumstances that would make them contemplate selling a vital organ. But possiblynot, if it allows society to ignore the underlying problem, either moving thetrade underground, or forcing people in such circumstances to resort to worseremedies.
Then again, part of our unease probably has to do with what we perceive asan unequal exchange. The seller is giving up part of her body in anirreversible transaction. The buyer is giving up only money – perhaps earned ona lucky stock trade or at an overpaid job. If that money had been earned byselling a portion of a lung, or represented savings painfully accumulatedduring years of backbreaking work, we mightconsider the exchange more equal.
Of course, the central virtue of moneyis precisely its anonymity. I need knownothing about the dollar bill I receive to be able to use it. But, becausemoney’s anonymity obscures its provenance, it may be socially less acceptable asa medium of payment for some objects.
In both examples – congressional tickets and organ sales – Sandel suggestsreducing money’s role. But money has many virtues in facilitating transactions– hence its ubiquitous use. So, perhaps themore important message is that society’s tolerance for monetizationis proportional to the legitimacy accordedto the distribution of money.
The more people believe that it is the hardworking and the deserving whohave money, the more they are willing to tolerate transactions for money(though some transactions remain beyond the pale). But if people believe thatthe moneyed are primarily those who are wellconnected or crooked,their tolerance for monetary transactions falls.
Rather than focusing on prohibitingmonetary transactions, perhaps a more important lesson impartedby Sandel’s examples is that we should work continuously to improve theperceived legitimacy of money’s distribution.
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