What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

As a result, without quite realizing it, without ever deciding to do so, we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.

The difference is this: A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor

Jumping the Queue

The point of the friendship analogy is this: the reason we (normally) can’t buy friends—the purchase would destroy the relationship—sheds light on how markets corrupt expressions of friendship.

WHAT MONEY CAN AND CANNOT BUY

How Markets Crowd Out Morals

depends on the moral status of trophy hunting. I

From the standpoint of economic reasoning, the market solution seems a clear winner. It makes some people better off and no one worse off. The ranchers make money, the hunters have a chance to stalk and shoot a formidable creature, and an endangered species is brought back from the brink of extinction. Who could complain?

nature is a dumping ground for those who can afford it

the incentive schemes that abound today go further. By putting an actual, explicit price on activities far removed from material pursuits, they take Becker’s shadow prices out of the shadows and make them real. They enact his suggestion that all human relations are, ultimately, market relations.

In this scenario, the market is an instrument, but not an innocent one. What begins as a market mechanism becomes a market norm. The obvious worry is that the payment may habituate children to think of reading books as a way of making money, and so erode, or crowd out, or corrupt the love of reading for its own sake.