Here is nice little book by Michael Sandel, who I first heard about on the Colbert Report. His main question is what he ends the book with, "Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?" He is speaking about our society and what type of one do we want to live in. It is a book which begs the question of how do markets reflect our morality and in what ways do they shape it. I really enjoyed the way Sandel writes this book with many case studies and arguments on both sides. While you can definitely see they way in which he thinks toward each situation, it seems he presents it more with the notion that these issues are something we need to realize and think critically about before they in turn shape who we become. Mainly using his two fold rubric of fairness and corruption, he assesses different situations to determine their moral judgement and how that relates to a market judgement. I think this raises some great questions to utilitarianism and different ways we make decisions. He is tying morality into everything we do, especially in the free market world, where not even here are you free from moral decisions. Rather we need to have these moral and civic discussions. Markets should not take a "nonjudgmental stance toward values." This is my overall impression and short summary, below I will give a chapter by chapter breakdown if you are interested.Jumping the Queue
Here Sandel brings up the line cutting issue of whether there are certain things we should all have to wait for, or can money buy a fast track. This includes jumping lines at airports, solo carpool drivers, ticket scalping, concierge doctors, and the new line standing business. Are there certain things that all should wait their turn for, or does the childhood rule "don't cut in line" not apply to us so grown up? He also speaks to some of the other ways we allocate things as merit, need, and others.
Incentives
Incentives are the name of the game of economics. I am not really a student of economics though I do know my way around moral and ethical issues, and this was perhaps my favorite chapter. He raises some tough questions and starts the chapter off with one of the toughest, asking whether drug addicted women should be offered incentives to become sterile. I still don't really know where I stand but here was brought up some great discussion. Being in education I agree with his assessment of corruption coming with paying students for reading or getting good grades, but I also see parallels in this and certain academic scholarships for students who have done well in high school and continue to do well in college. So incentives still play a part for secondary and above education, but perhaps in a little different vein than the direct cash incentives of his case studies. I think his statement here best sums up the chapter, "In general, cash incentives seem to work better at getting people to show up for a specific event-a doctor's appointment or an injection-than at changing long-term habits and behaviors".
How Markets Crowd Out Morals
Actually this was my favorite chapter. What can money buy? Friends, Nobel Prizes, Academy Awards... These are a few examples of things Sandel says we all agree money can't buy. Though any more I would say the way you use your money could buy you many "Friends". Perhaps not in the true sense of the word, but definitely in some ways in which we use the word. "Economists hate gift giving" I was interested about this topic and discussed it with my wife on which she would rather have. I remember how when I was a child getting money was lame, but now at times I would much rather have money than a gift, perhaps I have become corrupted toward the social free market system. I was very surprised by how market incentives tainted civic/national duty. It was a wonderful example of market corruption, but my favorite part is his discussion of the crowding out of non market norms, and the commercialization effect. The rubs comes to intrinsic motivations and external ones, and "when people are engaged n an activity they consider intrinsically worthwhile, offering them money may weaken their motivation" which goes against the fundamental economic theory. At one of the most interesting parts of the book he describes Arrow's two tenants of the market, both of which are very interesting but the second is the one most intriguing. "Ethical behavior is a commodity that needs to be economized" or that "Markets, which rely on self-interest, spare us from using up the limited supply of virtue". Sandel and I both agree that this is a complete falsehood. He goes into some wonderful discussions on love and altruism, but I see that this economizing of virtues distorts the very meaning of the words and "corrupts" them as Sandel might say.
Markets in Life and Death
This chapter discusses some of the moral issues within insurance and the difference between it and death bets. Much of this I didn't know about. I think it shows my own fallenness that as I am reading some of this and thinking how horrible it is, I am also thinking, "I wonder if I can make any money here".
Naming Rights
His last chapter mainly discussed advertising and where it should and should not be. While the arguments towards it were slightly on the fairness angle, most dealt with the corruption factor and degradation of the items, places, cars, or school that implemented the advertising. Woven within this chapter is also a theme he has sparsely throughout the book and that is the growing distance between the wealthy and the poor. One thing I think he notices and talks about which I very much admired is that the issue is not so much that certain people now have more money than others do, whether or not that is truer now of today than the past, but rather that the wealthy seems to live in a different world than the rest of us do. At the end of the chapter he calls it skyboxification. Where "the more things that money can buy, the fewer the occasions when people from different walks of life encounter one another". Perhaps we wouldn't really care to much if others had more money than us if they didn't or couldn't use it to separate themselves into their own world. Shouldn't we all be in this thing called life together anyway? I think this is a great aspect and personally I think it is one where the church can speak volumes. In the church community it shouldn't matter if you have money or not, we are all on the same level before God and all need each other in this "common life".
