Abstract
Deborah Satz’s Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale and Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy sound alarms about the contemporary buying and selling of everything from human organs, women’s wombs and children’s labor to places in line for “free” summer concerts, human faces for advertising, rights to pollute or to shoot endangered species, bets on celebrity deaths and legroom on airplanes. Each affirms the value of markets for many things, and each offers sustained rejoinders to the prevailing economic wisdom that all aspects of life are rightly organized by markets.
These books do not attempt to tell a complete story about how we have come to a historical pass in which market metrics are ubiquitous and normative across social, political, cultural and personal existence. They only lightly track the shift from neoclassical to neoliberal frames for conceiving markets themselves and do not consider the recalibration of labor as human capital, the eclipse of productive with financial capital, the shift from an entrepreneurial to investment model of economic conduct accompanying the financialization of everything, or the vast and growing markets in debt and derivatives. In short, they do not aspire to comprehensive political theories of the effects of what we have come to call neoliberalism. Rather, as their descriptive titles make clear, these books pose a more old fashioned question: what features of (mainly) human existence should and should not be organized, distributed or procured through markets? Satz is concerned with what she calls noxious markets—those that exploit human vulnerability or weak agency or cause great harm to individuals or societies. Sandel’s focus is on markets that intensify social inequality, coercion and corruption of value(s). Sandel’s is the more political book, Satz’s the more moral but both reproach a historical condition and political rationality that eludes their careful analytics. One can hear Nietzsche’s chuckle, and not only Marx’s.
A study in stylistic and intellectual contrasts, Sandel’s is the easier book to summarize but also to praise. Intentionally written for a popular rather than scholarly audience, yet no less analytically smart and sophisticated for that, his argument, compressed, is this: Consequent to post-1989 market triumphalism (and unabated by the 2008 finance capital crash), we have “drifted” from “having a market economy to being a market society.” With the latter, “market values are seeping into every aspect of human endeavor . . . social relations are made over in the image of the market,” and market reasoning is ubiquitous (10–11). What is badly needed, he believes, is a public conversation about the questions “what role should markets play in public life and personal relations?” and “which goods should [and shouldn’t] be bought and sold?” (11)
In the absence of such a conversation, Sandel argues, our existence is not simply becoming more crass and desacralized—that much is obvious—but less just, fair, and respectful of human dignity. Ubiquitous marketization submits democracies to two great corrosive forces: growing inequality and potential degradation of human existence as such. These are the significant strands Sandel adds to theorizing the damage neoliberalism does to democracy, strands he develops subtly and thoughtfully.
If neoliberal de-regulation, dismantling of public welfare and public goods, and regressive taxation policies contribute manifestly to income inequality, Sandel’s eye is on a more subtle inegalitarian effect of marketization—the stratification of access to all kinds of goods. Consider what the following have in common: concierge medicine; paid freeway express lanes; fastrak airport security lines for first-class passengers; scalped tickets for Yosemite campsites, Bruce Springsteen concerts, and Papal masses; quick paths to legal citizenship for immigrants with significant means; hired line-standers for everything from congressional hearings to Shakespeare in the Park; non-need-blind admissions at elite universities; tiered pricing for crowded tourist attractions to eliminate waiting for high-end ticket holders; proliferating private elementary schools; skyboxes at baseball parks. Each either transforms what was a public or at least publicly accessible good into one privately obtainable by some and wholly unaffordable for others. Or it transforms what was a shared experience among classes (standing in line at the amusement park, sitting together at the baseball game or in a traffic jam, waiting one’s turn at the doctor’s office or in airport security) into radically stratified and segregated ones, a development that also ensures declined quality in what’s left to those of modest means—witness deteriorating public schools, economy airline seating, public transportation, standard issue health care. Thus, marketization contributes significantly to social inequality by amplifying class-based privileges and deprivations but also eliminates shared experiences and care for a common good or goods (203). For Sandel, such effects are devastating to democracy, which requires both modest equality and a shared world.
These are, in my view, the most important arguments Sandel advances with his abundant examples and bright, brisk conversational prose. The arguments are not novel—others lamenting the privatization of public goods have made them, at times in greater depth. But Sandel is especially adept at linking a great variety of instances—with his curious yet ironic bent, he tours rather than screeches about our world—to reveal how relentless marketization, far from promoting the equality and freedom promised by rational choice economists, frequently undermines them. In this he offers the rudiments of a devastating political critique of neoliberal theory and practice.
Inequality and decreased care for public things and a common world do not exhaust Sandel’s indictment of relentless marketization. Insisting that markets imprint and transform what they touch, he is also alert to the many ways marketization can corrupt or degrade the value of cherished things, creatures, and activities—from major league baseball (he wears his passion for it on his sleeve) to learning, art, friendship, apologies, gestation of new life, sex, charitable work, health, dying, endangered species and more. Again, the argument is not new: Mandeville, Smith and Marx (and before them, Plato and Aristotle, and after them, Veblen and Marcuse) have all made the point. But Sandel’s talent is in linking scores of quotidian examples to reveal how marketization transforms an entity or activity’s value, our own sensibilities and principles, and society as a whole. As he considers human foreheads and baseball announcers bought by advertising, purchased wedding toasts and apologies, viaticals and other secondary markets in life insurance that make a stranger’s death lucrative, paying elementary school students for reading or testing well, the replacement of gifts with gift-certificates, honorary degrees for rich rather than accomplished individuals, we are easily convinced about the troubling nature of these markets. And we also grasp Sandel’s larger point that these kinds of things, objectionable in themselves, also “crowd out nonmarket norms” to fundamentally remake our society, our principles and ourselves.
Yet this is where the argument runs onto the shoals. On the one hand, Sandel calls for public deliberation about what things should be for sale. On the other hand, he describes in arch detail the process by which society and its inhabitants are being transformed by their saturation with market reasoning. So how will these humans and this society draw the lines he wants us to draw? With what resources does a marketized soul resist a marketized world? (Indeed how does even a non-marketized soul wage such resistance? Any parent who has recently accompanied a child through the college applications process, with its exploding markets in private consultants, tutors for standardized tests and essay writing, and countless other for-purchase advantages for the already advantaged, knows this quandary. Any aging academic anxiously awaiting an upgrade for an intercontinental flight knows it too.) Moreover, even if “we” developed consensus about what should not be marketized, what could possibly enforce the consensus? What will make the baseball stadium offer general and affordable seating again? What will stop well-to-do parents from abandoning public schools? What will stop the scalpers, the line-standers, the derivatives markets in everything from bad debt to early death? What will incite the elites who buy their way out of the commons to throw aside their privilege and rejoin the masses? What will entice public universities to renounce the marketization language and practices that increasingly organize every facet of their operation?
Even leaving aside neoliberal rationality, on what basis can we expect a reversal of capitalism’s path of commodifying everything and everyone? When and where in history has there been de-commodification? The more common story is that the new market scandalizing us today becomes ordinary tomorrow. Certainly those reading this review have this experience with the neoliberalization of academic life . . . remember when “impact factor” was an obscene rather than normal measure of a journal’s worth, when self-promotion or entrepreneurial conduct were bad manners for a professor?
In short, Sandel’s book offers a compelling expose of our current condition but frames what it exposes as a matter of values, decisions and inadvertent “drift” rather than historical forces, social powers, a governing rationality or an economy whose life principle is growth and new markets. Consequently, he understates the dimensions and depth of the problem and places the burden of fixing it before the feet of a people interpellated by the condition he indicts and who cannot easily deliver us from the problem by deliberating about it. He also casts markets as that which, once returned to their proper place, will cease to generate the inegalitarian and corrupting effects he illuminates so well. This, of course, is to abstract markets from capitalism itself—its ceaseless expansion, its basis in and production of inequality, its descralizations and its production of orders of reason that normalize it.
If Sandel may be forgiven for a strategically hopeful book that may be understood as trying to wake a somnambulant people, Satz is not so easily let off the hook. A moral philosopher working a field sewn by reasoning and reasons, her ambition is to establish and mobilize correct criteria to decide which goods and activities ought to be bought and sold, which markets are “noxious” and which are not. Thus markets are wrong for surrogate pregnancy but not in vitro fertilization or selling sperm, for female but not male prostitution, for child labor but not immigrant farm labor, for human kidneys but not beef. How does this go?
Satz’s book is premised on the notion that there is not one economy but, rather, specific markets in goods and activities, each of which should be judged according to moral concerns that exceed contemporary economists’ preoccupation with individual choice and efficiency. These concerns include the effects of markets “on the structure of our relationships with one another, on our democracy, and on human motivation” (34–35). Her thesis is that even efficient markets emerging from voluntary agreements may be objectionable “insofar as they arise from weak agency, exploit the underlying vulnerabilities of the most vulnerable, or have extremely harmful consequences for individuals or their societies” (35).
Satz explicitlystands on the shoulders of the classical economists (by which she means Smith, Marx and Ricardo) to advance these four criteria for what makes a noxious market. Indeed, the book’s most valuable section involves revisiting the classical economists to reveal how much broader, deeper and more critical were their perspectives on markets than those of their neoclassical heirs. The neoclassicists, treating undesirable market effects mainly as a sign that marketization is incomplete, cannot account for common opprobrium toward, for example, vote buying, sex exchanged for a promotion, mercenaries or contract slavery, when both buyer and seller consent and gain. The classical economists, on the other hand, not only grasped the socially embedded quality of markets but knew markets could not be the sole organizing principle of society without destroying it (39).
Satz particularly values Adam Smith’s understanding of markets as heterogenous and as profoundly shaping societies and individuals; his recognition that labor markets may be quite deleterious in this shaping; and above all his belief that the value of markets lies in the substantive freedoms they enable—freedom from dependency and arbitra ry power and not only freedom for interest maximization (46, 49, 51). If Satz misstates the extent to which feudalism rather than mercantilism is the tacit foil for many of Smith’s formulations, she is effective in reminding us that his account of markets was complex, qualified, and featured greater social and political depth than that of many who now claim his mantle
From Ricardo, Satz draws his appreciation of class conflict (“the interest of the landlord is always opposed to the interest of every other class in the community”) and recognition that there are cases in which national ownership can foster economic growth while private ownership can derail it (54). In her turn to Marx, Satz brackets controversial claims dependent upon the labor theory of value to foreground his insistence that labor markets are produced by depriving laborers of independent means of support, that absent systems of regulation and rights labor markets aren’t fair because workers are generally desperate, and that labor within capitalism often demeans, deskills and degrades (57).
These are among the formulations powering Satz’s belief that, compared with the neoclassicists, the classical economists’ vision is larger, deeper and above all, more moral in its care for the distribution of social product among classes and the effects of markets on individuals and society. The neoclassical dedication to optimizing consumer preferences strikes her as puny by comparison (61).
If her reflection on the classical economists offers a strong counter to contemporary economic paradigms especially insofar as these paradigms have become common sense, less compelling is Satz’s critical engagement with Dworkin, Walzer and Nozick through which she offers her theory of “specific” as opposed to “general egalitarianism.” The ground is tired and does not set up the next chapter in which she offers her own criteria for evaluating what makes specific markets noxious. Indeed, while she keeps returning to “our capacity to interact as equals” as decisive in valuing or disvaluing particular markets, inequality is then tucked into the back pockets of her fourfold criteria for noxious markets: (1) extremely harmful outcomes for individuals, (2) extremely harmful outcomes for society, (3) weak agency, and (4) vulnerability (94–97). For Satz, markets trafficking in any of these should be regulated, discouraged, made more accountable, heavily taxed or banned, depending on which of these remedies is most likely to be effective in reducing the harm.
In the book’s second half, Satz attempts to bring these criteria to bear on markets in reproductive surrogacy, prostitution, child labor, voluntary slavery/indentured servitude, and human kidneys. In each case, Satz attempts to substitute good reasons for poor ones in objecting to these markets. Thus, for example, she rejects the arguments against surrogacy and prostitution that claim they violate something essentially female, bodily or intimate to argue instead that they reinforce a social problem, namely gender inequality. Each, she claims, reinforces inegalitarian stereotypes of women; both perpetuate men’s control over women and women’s limited autonomy. Thus, she objects to surrogacy not because “pregnancy contracts, like military contracts, give someone control over someone else’s body” but because “the body that is controlled belongs to a woman, in a society that historically has subordinated women’s interests to those of men, primarily through its control over women’s sexuality and reproduction” (129). Moreover, contract pregnancy reinforces “negative stereotypes about women as ‘baby machines’ (130) just as prostitution reinforces negative stereotypes about women as existing to sexually service men.
I find these arguments largely unconvincing: First, paying women for reproductive and sexual services in no way clearly perpetuates rather than challenges women’s historical lack of autonomy, or reduction to sex and baby making. Second, pregnancy contracts would hardly seem to reinforce gendered stereotypes more than, say, child care work or nursing the elderly. Indeed, what could secure the stereotype and the reality of women’s inequality (not to mention that turning on race and immigration status) more systematically than the intensely gendered and woefully low-wage labor market for child care and preschool workers? Why oppose one but not the other? (The only answer forces us to sacralize and essentialize the body, sexuality or pregnancy, which Satz is at pains not to do.) Third, if we oppose labor and commodities markets reinforcing stereotypes pertinent to inequality, what a field day we will have! Caribbean nannies, Chicano farm workers, Hispanic gardeners and restaurant kitchen workers, Latina housecleaners, Black sanitation workers, Eastern European fashion models—the list is unending. Surely such labor market segregation draws upon and reinforces stereotypes far more than a market in which a graduate student chooses sex work over a student loan, or in which a single mother opts for a surrogacy contract over a marriage contract or cashiering at Target. Fourth, Satz is largely inattentive to social inequalities other than gender bearing on her cases, not only race but class. To state the obvious, women of means rarely work as prostitutes or paid surrogates, or for that matter as nannies, child care workers, receptionists or cafeteria line cooks, but Satz has little to say about the perpetuation of class/race inequality as a criterion for noxious markets. This despite her insistence that “markets should be curtailed or regulated whenever they block the capacity of people to interact as equals” (67).
Then there is Satz’s argument that markets in prostitution and surrogacy bear negatively on “the way all women see themselves,” hence compromise “all women’s autonomy” (130, 149). At this point, one senses the strong wind of Catharine MacKinnon at Satz’s back: against the sting of misogynistic constructions of female sexuality and pregnancy in male superordinate societies, Satz does not attack the construction but vilifies the most naked and reduced forms of these activities. Indeed, rather than counter the combination of misogyny and conservative familialism stigmatizing the appearance of sex and pregnancy on the market, Satz moves to shore up biological kinship and marital sexuality.
I have dwelt at length on the chapters concerning sex work and pregnancy because they are iconic of three larger problems in the book:
First, Satz begins with markets she personally finds noxious and then piles up reasons to establish their noxiousness. Some, but not all, of the reasons are drawn from her philosophical criteria for market noxiousness; others simply rehearse mainstream social norms and aversions. She builds philosophical houses for these norms rather than exploring how they intersect with markets or why we are all inconsistent, even irrational, in the practices of commodification we most abhore or abjure.
Second,there is no bright line between the markets Satz objects to and most capitalist markets, their imbrication with existing global inequalities, their exploitation of the historically damned, their predation on lack of alternatives. Dig a little and almost any market, from that producing iPhones and Nikes in Asia or picking fruit in California, to those peddling life insurance and credit cards, to those trafficking secondary mortgages and derivatives, will turn out to implicate “weak agency, exploit the underlying vulnerabilities of the most vulnerable, or have extremely harmful consequences for individuals or their societies.”
Third, Satz’s criteria for noxiousness are irrelevant to markets in non-human planetary life except to the extent that humans are damaged by them. These criteria cannot address, for example, the hideous markets in rhinoceros horns, elephant tusks, exotic furs or factory farmed meat. (What could have “weaker agency” or more “underlying vulnerability” than creatures cruelly farmed or hunted for their body parts?) They do not address the markets abetting the destruction of rainforests, oceans, water tables, arctic ice caps, or agricultural lands through carbon emissions, drilling, fracking, overfishing, toxic sea farming or Monsanto-style food production. While some of these might be said to have “extremely harmful consequences for societies,” sustainability, creaturely care and wilderness preservation as intrinsic ends have no place in Satz’s table of values. If they did, they would call into question a vast number of contemporary production processes and markets.
Which brings us back to capitalism, the order that dare not speak its name in either of these books. If Marx had one thing right, it is that the sphere of exchange, the marketplace, occludes rather than reveals the sources, conditions and powers generating the objects and personnel circulating in it. To grasp and measure the inequalities and corruption with which Sandel is concerned, or the weak agency and exploited vulnerability and damage Satz decries, we cannot remain, conceptually or empirically, “in this noisy sphere where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men” but must explore instead “the hidden abode of production” to which we might now add “the mysterious order of financialization.” 1 Here we will discern not merely the occasional noxious market, but the noxiousness of a global economic system in which the problems analyzed by Satz and Sandel–ever expanding commodification and monetization– are not incidental but bedrock.