What Money Can't Buy, Michael Sandel

What Money Can't Buy:  the Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel.  Harvard professor talks about markets?  Count me in!

Started:  2/18/2018

Completed: 3/1/2018

Recommended By: Nobody

Recommendation: Recommended

Review:

So, the idea here is that there are two things all of us are missing in our analysis of free markets.  1) People do not always operate in their own best interest and 2) introducing a market can have an influence over the product(s) commoditized by the market.  There are a couple of other interesting points that follow from these:

• Markets can corrupt common morality when introduced (e.g. People who are charged a fee for being late to pick up a child at day care start to accept the fee as a payment for being late and the concept of not holding up the teacher is removed).
• Incentives can backfire (e.g. monetary incentives can be perceived as blackmail instead of as compensation)
• Money isn't everything (e.g. gifts also indicate that one has thought about another, so there is more than monetary value involved)

The upshot is that markets are not always a good idea.  Private prisons have always been a problem for me because I could not figure out how to generate a monetary reward for rehabilitating prisoners (e.g. private prisons make more money when there are more prisoners, so why rehabilitate?).  I have wondered how to provide a proper incentive to make a private prison work.  The reality is that there is no incentive because rehabilitating prisoners is not associated with money, it is associated with morality and a sense of the public good.  Any effort to "incentivize" prisons so that more prisoners will be rehabilitated will fail because it is not associated with money.  Private prisons will simply fail because having a market for them is nonsensical.  Ditto for schools.  Paying teachers for test scores doesn't work because successful teaching needs to be its own passion and no desire for money can replace that passion.

Read the book and stop hating Capitalism and start hating misplaced markets.