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Sandel and Value
A few months ago, I read What Money can’t Buy by Michael J Sandel. He is a good communicator and I have really enjoyed some of lectures on justice on TV. This book is worth reading, because it show western culture in a different light.
In this book, he argues that markets are valuable for organising productive activity, but his concerned that market are seeping into aspects of life, where they do not belong. He wants a debate about the role and reach of markets. He wants decisions about which goods should be bought and sold. The aim should be a market economy, not a market society.
The problem with this is that it is not clear who would make the decision about what can be bought and sold. I presume that he assumes that governments can do this, but this will not work. Decisions about what can be sold are made by the person who chooses to sell. Decisions about what will be bought are make the people doing the buying. Unless they are doing something immoral, it is hard to see how they can be prevented.
The examples that he give are interesting. I think they show how hollow western culture has become. The answer is not more laws, but better values and more virtue.
Sandel speaks about market values, and suggests that they corrupt some good things. He says that when some things are sold, their value is contaminated. The problem here is that he assumes a concept of objective value. He does not realise that values are subjective. This is a core principle of economics. Different people place different value on the same things. This is why trade is possible. A sale of a good takes place, because the person buying values it more than the person selling it.
The price at which a particular good is sold in a market does not tell us its value. It does not tell us how most people value it. It does not tell us what value the buyer and seller put on it. All we know is that the buyer valued it more than the price and the seller valued it less than the price. But we do not know by how much.
Human valuations are subjective. The only person who can express objective values is God, because he is the only one who is unchanging.
2012-12-17 04:27:28
Source: http://getrad2.blogspot.com/2012/12/sandel-and-value.html
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