Social obligations and markets
“In an interview on NPR this week [Michael Sandel] made the point very eloquently: we are moving from a market economy to a market society; moving from looking at the market mechanism as an important social tool, to looking at it as the supreme social value. He argues that this movement in values and thought has the result of crowding out more substantive moral values.”
In the past, I’ve found Sandel a bit of a snooze, but I really liked this. Also this: “Many economists now recognize that markets change the character of the goods and social practices they govern. In recent years, one of the first to emphasize the corrosive effect of markets on nonmarket norms was Fred Hirsch, a British economist who served as senior adviser to the International Monetary Fund. In a book published in 1976 — the same year that Gary Becker’s influential An Economic approach to Human Behavior appeared and three years before Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister — Hirsch challenged the assumption that the value of a good is the same whether provided through the market or in some other way.”
