'Do we want a society where everything is up for sale?'

Michael J Sandel is one of the foremost political philosophers of our times. He is the Anne T and Robert M Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught political philosophy since 1980. His new book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, argues that we have drifted from being a market economy to being a market society. In this freewheeling interview, he speaks to Vivek Kaul.

One of the reasons you wrote What Money Can’t Buy was to reintroduce moral philosophy into conversations about market forces. Why was that necessary?
The last three decades have been a period of market triumphalism. The era started when the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan proclaimed their conviction that markets, not government, held the key to prosperity and freedom. We have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society. And the difference is this. A market economy is a valuable and effective tool for organising productivity activity. And market economy has brought prosperity and affluence to countries around the world. A market society is different. A market society is a place where almost everything is up for sale. It’s a way of life in which uses markets to allocate health, education, public safety, national security, environmental protection, recreation, procreation and other social goods. This was unheard of three decades back. And when this happens market values crowd out non-market values worth caring about. So I think we need to step back and have a public debate about what should be the role of money in markets in our society. We need to ask where market mechanism suits the public good and where they don’t belong.

Could you give us an example?
Let me give you a couple of them. In Iraq and Afghanistan there were more paid military private contractors on the ground than US military troops. We never had a public debate whether we wanted to outsource war to private companies. But this is what happened.

Now take education. Many school districts in the United States are experimenting with the use of cash incentives to improve academic performance, especially for students with disadvantaged backgrounds. So they are offered cash incentives for good grades, for high test scores and in one case they even offered young children two dollars for each book they read. Now the goal is of course a good one to improve academic performance. But the danger is that offering students money to learn may teach them the wrong lesson. It may teach students to regard reading books as a chore against making money rather than an activity which is intrinsically satisfying and worthwhile. That’s my worry.

Any other examples?
The number of private guards in Great Britain and the United States is twice the number of public police officers. Or consider the aggressive marketing of prescription drugs by pharmaceutical companies in rich countries. The funny thing is if you have ever seen the television commercials that accompany the evening news in the United States, you might come around to believing that the greatest health crisis in the world is not malaria or river blindness or sleeping sickness, but erectile dysfunction.

In your book you even talk about queues being up for sale nowadays. Can you share that with our readers?
In recent decades, the ethic of the queue is being replaced by the ethic of money. The principle of first come first serve is being replaced by the ability to pay. This is happening in large places and small. If one goes to an amusement park it used to be the place everyone had to wait in the queue for the popular rides and attractions. Now most amusement parks have a fast-track ticket that enables those who can afford to pay extra to go the head of the queue. The same is true for airports. Those who buy first-class or business-class tickets can use priority lanes that take them to the front of the line for screening. British Airways calls it Fast Track, which is a service that allows the high paying passengers of the airline jump the queue at passport and immigration control.

So what is the issue with that?
It may not be a morally serious problem at amusement parks or airports but increasingly the ethic of money is replacing the ethic of the queue throughout our social life. In Washington DC if one wants to attend a hearing of the United States Congress, often there are long queues. Sometimes people even wait in the queue overnight. Now lobbyists love to attend the Congressional hearings but they don’t have the time to stand in a queue. So they now hire line-standing companies that, in turn, hire homeless people and others to wait in the queue so that the lobbyists can take his or her place in the queue just before the hearing begins and he can thus climb the queue. The same thing can be done by hiring the line-standing companies to attend the US Supreme Court’s oral arguments. So what may seem innocent enough in amusement parks or concerts or waiting to buy the latest Apple iPod actually raises more serious questions when it is used to even in institutions which are representatives of governments.

A major point that comes out in your book is that monetary incentives sometimes undermine the intrinsic one and leads to worse performance. Why is that?
Some years ago in Switzerland they were trying to decide where to locate a nuclear waste site. No community wants one in its backyard. There was a small town that seemed to be the likely place for the nuclear place site. The residents of the town were asked in a survey carried out by economists shortly before a referendum on the issue if they would vote to accept a nuclear waste site in their community. Around 51% or a little over half of the respondents said they would accept it. The reason was that their sense of civic duty outweighed their concern about risks. The economists carrying out the survey then added a little twist to the entire exercise and asked a follow-up question.

And what was that?
They asked the residents of the community that suppose the parliament proposed building the nuclear waste facility in their community and at the same time offered to compensate them with an annual monetary payment, would they still favour it? You might sense that the number would have gone up to 80 or 90% but in fact the opposite happened. The support went down and not up. Adding the financial inducement to the offer reduced the rate of acceptance to 25% from the earlier 51%. The offer of money reduced the willingness of people to host the nuclear site in their community. Even when the economists upped the monetary incentive further the decision of the people did not change. The residents stood firm even when they were offered yearly cash payments of $8,700, which was more than the median monthly income of the area.

So what is the moral of the story?
This is an illustration in which a cash payment can crowd out a non-market value. When the people were asked to make a sacrifice for a common good without paying them the majority said yes out of the sense of civic responsibility. But when they were asked changed their mind many of them said we didn’t want to be bribed. The offer of money changed the character of the offer. What had been a question of civic sacrifice for the common good now became a financial transaction, and many of those who were willing to accept the setting up of a nuclear site for the purpose of a common good felt they were not willing to be bribed to subject themselves and their family to risk.

Can you summarise the entire argument for our readers? 
The marketisation of everything means that people who are rich and people who are not rich have started to live increasingly separate lives. And that is not good for democracy, nor is it a satisfying way to live. Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life. For this is how we learn to come to care about the common good. And so, in the end, the question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honour and money cannot buy?