Nice talk by Michael Sandel on markets and morality. And how the 2008 subprime crisis illustrates our drift from a market economy to a market society i.e everything is a market even if it is at the expense of others...
Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if we turn them into market commodities. So when we decide when to use markets, it’s not enough to think about efficiency. It’s not even enough to think about market freedom. We also have to decide how to value the goods in question, be they health, education, national defense, criminal justice, environmental protection, and so on.
These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. And to decide them democratically we have to debate them, case by case, just as we have begun to do here, the moral meaning of these goods and the proper way of valuing them.
This is the debate that we didn’t have in the age of market triumphalism. And as a result, without quite realizing it, without ever deciding to do so, we drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society.
Comments
Post a Comment