More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 7 - February 13, 2021
We live at a time when almost everything can be bought and sold.
SOme really interesting stuff that can be bought from prison upgrdes to wombs
Today, that faith is in doubt. The era of market triumphalism has come to an end.
Some say the moral failing at the heart of market triumphalism was greed,
This is, at best, a partial diagnosis.
It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.
Consider inequality. In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means.
But as money comes to buy more and more—political influence, good medical care, a home in a safe neighborhood rather than a crime-ridden one, access to elite schools rather than failing ones—the
Where all good things are bought and sold, having money makes all the difference in the world.
Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they also express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged.
Markets leave their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket values worth caring about.
If you are called to jury duty, you may not hire a substitute to take your place.
some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities.
In 2011, surveys found that the American public blamed the federal government more than Wall Street financial institutions for the economic problems facing the country—by
In its own way, market reasoning also empties public life of moral argument.
If someone is willing to pay for sex or a kidney, and a consenting adult is willing to sell, the only question the economist asks is, “How much?”
we believe that selling these things values them in the wrong way and cultivates bad attitudes.
We dont sell votes or children
“Gone are the days when the theme-park queue was the great equalizer,”
Some put blow-up dolls in the passenger seat in hopes of fooling the highway patrol.
To avoid carpool lane lines
For fees of up to $10 during rush hour, solo drivers can buy the right to use car pool lanes.
The line-standing companies charge the lobbyists $36 to $60 per hour for the queuing service, which means that getting a seat in a committee hearing can cost $1,000 or more. The line standers themselves are paid $10–$20 per hour.
There is something distasteful about scalping tickets to see a doctor.
Like the concierge at a five-star hotel, the concierge physician is at your service around the clock.
an MDVIP practice in Boca Raton sets out fruit salad and sponge cake in the waiting room. But since there is little if any waiting, the food often goes untouched.
The fact that my line stander and I strike a deal proves that we are both better off as a result.
Hired line standers do not reduce the total number of people who see the performance; they only change who sees it.
It puts ordinary folks at a disadvantage and makes it harder for them to get tickets.
Getting tickets to those willing to pay the highest price for them is the best way of determining who most values a Shakespeare performance.
the willingness to pay for a good does not show who values it most highly.
Suppose lobbyists were taxed when they hired line-standing companies, and the proceeds were used to make line-standing services affordable for ordinary citizens. The subsidies might take the form, say, of vouchers redeemable for discounted rates at line-standing companies. Such a scheme might ease the unfairness of the present system.
market values are corrosive of certain goods but appropriate to others.
Treating religious rituals, or natural wonders, as marketable commodities is a failure of respect. Turning sacred goods into instruments of profit values them in the wrong way.
Delta Airlines recently proposed giving frequent flyers a controversial perk: the option of paying $5 extra to speak to a customer service agent in the United States, rather than be routed to a call center in India. Public disapproval led Delta to abandon the idea.39
Under what conditions do market relations reflect freedom of choice, and under what conditions do they exert a kind of coercion?
A judge who accepts a bribe in exchange for a corrupt verdict sells something that isn’t his to sell; the verdict is not his property. But a woman who agrees to be sterilized for pay sells something that belongs to her—namely, her reproductive capacity.
What is more corrupt ?
The money had an expressive effect—making academic achievement “cool.” That’s why the amount was not decisive.
The Advanced Placement incentive programs have succeeded not by bribing students to achieve but by changing attitudes toward achievement and the culture of schools.
Now parents considered a late pickup as a service for which they were willing to pay. They treated the fine as if it were a fee.
If it’s cheaper to replace kerosene lamps in Indian villages than to abate emissions in the United States, why not pay to replace the lamps?
If someone in London feels guilty for cheating on his (or her) spouse, he can pay someone in Manchester to be faithful, thus “offsetting” the transgression.
Suppose you want more friends than you have. Would you try to buy some? Not likely.
Japan and soci medi followers
Economists don’t like gifts. Or to be more precise, they have a hard time making sense of gift giving as a rational social practice.
“We value items we receive as gifts 20 percent less, per dollar spent, than items we buy for ourselves.”
Altruism, generosity, solidarity, and civic spirit are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are more like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise.
In 2011, Amazon began selling two versions of its popular Kindle readers, one with and one without “special offers and sponsored screensavers.” The model with special offers costs $40 less than the standard version but comes with rotating ads on the screen saver and at the bottom of the home page.42
In 1998, the owners offered a free lunch for life to anyone willing to have the restaurant’s logo—a boy in a sombrero riding a giant ear of corn—tattooed on his or her body. The Sanchez family thought that few people, if any, would take them up on the offer. They were wrong. Within months, more than forty people were walking the streets of San Francisco sporting Casa Sanchez tattoos.
A few years later, an ad agency in London began selling advertising space on people’s foreheads.
In 2009, Scholastic, the world’s largest publisher of children’s books, distributed free curricular materials about the energy industry to sixty-six thousand fourth-grade teachers. The curriculum, called the “United States of Energy,” was funded by the American Coal Foundation. The industry-sponsored lesson plan highlighted the benefits of coal but made no mention of mining accidents, toxic waste, greenhouse gases, or other environmental effects. When press accounts reported widespread criticism of the one-sided curriculum, Scholastic announced that it would scale back its corporate-sponsored
...more
In 2011, a Colorado school district sold advertising space on report cards.
And so, in the end, the question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?
