What money can’t buy
by Michael Cook
What is the proper role of money and markets in a democratic society? How can we protect the priceless goods in moral and civic life from being bought and sold?
Does everything have a price? Sometimes you might think so.
In the US, egg donation agencies will pay college women between US$5,000 and $50,000 for their eggs. The price rises with their SAT scores, the institution they attend, and their attractiveness.
Ten years ago, if you were really hard up, you could make a quick buck by posing as a human billboard. Karolyne Smith sold the advertising space above her eyebrows to an online casino, GoldenPalace.com, so that she could finance her child’s schooling. Now she has to wear bangs to hide the disfiguring tattoo.
At the height of the AIDS epidemic, investors discovered the profitability of financial instruments called viaticals. They would buy a US$100,000 life insurance policy from a dying AIDS patient for $50,000. If the patient died in a year, they would make a 100 percent profit. Of course, if he lingered on, the rate of return declined steeply, so investors had to pray for an early death. Retrovirals killed this sector of the market because AIDS patients started to survive.
Is there anything wrong with transactions like these? In his latest book, What Money Can’t Buy, about the moral limits of markets Harvard professor Michael J. Sandel argues that there is. Sandel is one of the best-known academics in the United States. His popular Harvard course on justice is offered online and he fills lecture halls, even stadiums, with fans around the world.
He is troubled by the notion that everything in life can be construed as a market transaction. Markets are expanding into spheres of life where they do not belong and we are drifting from participation in a market economy to immersion in a market society. A market economy is a tool for organising productive activity. But a market society is based on an ideological distortion of the law of supply and demands. He offers scores of innovative ways that investors are monetising social life, not just material goods, in ways that seem unfair or degrading, both small and big.
Some schools offer children $2 to read books to encourage literacy. An Indian surrogate mother can be engaged to bear a child for around US$10,000. You can earn $7,500 to serve as a human guinea pig in a drug trial. For $1,500 or more a year, you can get same-day appointment with a “concierge doctor” for your ailments.
Many economists see nothing wrong in any of these transactions. Supply and demand, for them, is an ideology which explains all human activity and makes social life possible. It is independent of moral and political philosophy and has no more ethical value than chemistry or physics. It can even be deployed to measure altruism. As the former president of Harvard, , once said (at morning prayers!),
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