tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848147048378033728.post4321444881210501540..comments2018-03-18T18:43:37.773+01:00Comments on The Philosopher's Beard: Michael Sandel on the commercialisation of private and civic life Thomas R. Wellshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16009016049947278898noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848147048378033728.post-52640062923224987072014-07-29T03:14:58.239+02:002014-07-29T03:14:58.239+02:00Good point about how in the past there were areas ...Good point about how in the past there were areas that were not &quot;sacred&quot; but are now treated as non-market. I was thinking about stuff like life insurance, which was considered obviously immoral at its inception but is now considered perfectly normal. These non-uniform dynamics across areas is pretty interesting--it makes me think about Fiske and Haslum&#39;s work on political conflict based on different categorizations of relationships into market, authority, communal sharing, and equality matching.<br /><br />I have to disagree that advertising presents an externality in the neoclassical sense, or at least if it does the same complaint would apply to all forms of unasked-for communication and to aesthetic offenses, leading to a regulatory regime on people trying to make conversation or pick out what outfit to wear. Goodbye freedom of speech. And get a shave, beard guy.<br /><br />As far as payday loans go, perpetual debt in return for liquidity may be better than not having liquidity. Banks hate dealing with small accounts, and their cost of processing can eat up poor peoples&#39; assets more quickly than the payday lenders do. I&#39;ve read some of Zwicky&#39;s research here and it can be eye-opening.srpnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848147048378033728.post-84610910074621498482014-07-26T22:25:39.811+02:002014-07-26T22:25:39.811+02:00As ever, thanks for your comment, srp. Actually, ...As ever, thanks for your comment, srp.<br /><br />Actually, I&#39;m not so sure that more kinds of things (rather than products) are permitted to be sold now than before the establishment of capitalism - recall that people, public offices (even tax collecting), military commissions, votes, marriage, short-cuts to heaven (indulgences) and so on were all for sale relatively recently. Take the family. Prior to the prosperity and bourgeois norms induced by the development of capitalism it was explicitly conceived as an economic production unit and children were workers. Now the family is treated as outside economic logic and children are consumption goods (like pets).<br /><br />On advertising, my concern was about scale, while Sandel&#39;s was particularly concerned with kind. In practise it is pretty difficult to buy your way out of advertising, e.g. when travelling whether by car (billboards) or subway or bus. The reason is pretty clear. Advertising consists in the sale of our attention between 3rd parties without our consent. HBO is rare - in most cases even if you pay (cinema tickets, bus tickets, etc) you will still be advertised to as well because that is an additional revenue stream available to companies. Because we are not the customers but the product, the advertising &#39;market&#39; underprices its costs to us. The result is that the price charged to advertisers is too low, and thus an excessive amount of advertising is produced which wastes the precious commodity of our valuable attention by distracting us with information we don&#39;t want or need. This is a standard neoclassical economics argument and doesn&#39;t rest on egalitarian but libertarian moral assumptions.<br /><br />On payday loan companies. Yes yes - I read the Economist too. But those chains whose business model depends on deliberately inducing perpetual debt - i.e. targeting people who will be unable to pay back loans - so as to keep charging interest and fees indefinitely - are pretty clearly rapacious. They exploit the lack of savvy of their vulnerable customers to offer a deal that doesn&#39;t enable people to better live their lives but further immiserates them.Thomas R. Wellshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16009016049947278898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848147048378033728.post-78460314858535209882014-07-25T04:52:26.770+02:002014-07-25T04:52:26.770+02:00Your instinct that corruption v. purity arguments ...Your instinct that corruption v. purity arguments are naturally illiberal is a good one. Anthropologically it seems that most cultures have acceptable zones of exchange, where like is traded for like but where trading unlike for like is forbidden. In market societies, the range of things that cannot be traded for money has shrunk but has by no means disappeared, even though the consequences of banning such trades are sometimes dire (e.g. not allowing payment for live kidney donors). There is still room for progress in this direction.<br /><br />Your argument about &quot;rapacious capitalism&quot; seems misguided. For example, the alleged harms of pervasive advertising seem just as aesthetic and ungrounded as Sandel&#39;s complaints, which you justly criticize as mere curmudgeonly grumbling. Moreover, there is an obvious market opportunity to be exposed to less advertising in return for higher direct payment, as in watching HBO instead of network television in the United States. In many cases &quot;capitalism&quot; is just the messenger delivering the objective economic news, e.g. that the amount of information chasing our finite attention is growing exponentially or that way more people with goods to trade want to live on finite beachfront property than ever before. Such problems would exist without markets and would pop up in more destructive manifestations in a more-heavily regulated or non-market society.<br /><br />You should also do more careful analysis of some of your throwaway lines about the evils of institutions such as payday lending. Careful empirical analysis, including interviewing users of such services, changes the picture away from one of simplistic exploitation to one of actual added value for those segments of the market. There is a tendency for highly educated elites to underestimate the savvy and practicality of the &quot;oppressed.&quot;srpnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848147048378033728.post-92153796173786889922014-07-07T21:51:18.557+02:002014-07-07T21:51:18.557+02:00Great comment! Thanks, Ralph. Great comment! Thanks, Ralph. Thomas R. Wellshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16009016049947278898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848147048378033728.post-44763631441645230982014-07-07T03:11:09.301+02:002014-07-07T03:11:09.301+02:00Since P does not imply not-P, I am not inclined to...Since P does not imply not-P, I am not inclined to agree with this assumption: &quot;If there&#39;s something we might call rapacious capitalism, then arguably ipso facto there is something (not widely realized so far) we might call virtuous capitalism.&quot; We can imagine the positive of a negative and the negative of a positive but, contradictory opposites do not imply each other. Furthermore, the existence of something does not imply the existence of its opposite. There is no coffee in my cup does not imply there is coffee in my cup even though we can imagine coffee is in my cup. I say this not to quibble, but to get to virtuous capitalism and rapturous capitalism not as opposites like north and south, but as connotations of competition. <br /><br />I grew to believe competition is good. Dictionaries associate competition with &quot;rivalry&quot; and synonyms suggest: bout, game, contest, dogfight, and so forth, but the core activity of competition is winners make losers. Little League baseball softens competition with participation trophies. However, professionals on Wall Street, in football (both kinds) do not mistake the participation trinkets of Wall Street, the Super Bowl or the World Cup for the winner&#39;s Ring, money, or the Trophy. Competition destroys the dreams of many losers for the dreams of a few winners. <br /><br />Michael Jordan&#39;s competitive aggression is not often inferred from his public persona. Jordan, in The Dream Team is described by Charles Barkley as, &quot;The most competitive person I know.&quot; In that same show Scotty Pippin says, when Michael gets that look just get out of his way. Jordan says, &quot;I play to win, wether during practice or in a real game. And I will not let anything get in the way of me and my competitive enthusiasm to win.&quot; My enthusiasm on Syracuse University crew team (rowing) to win a seat in the eight was a dogfight. My opponent and I were friends, but we did not eat at the same table, bunk near each other, or spend much time together, and verbal exchangers were between two strangers. Intense competition is beneficial, even thought it elevates a few winners at the expense of more losers. <br /><br />Free competition is doing whatever it takes to win. Free competition includes taking out Nancy Kerrigan&#39;s knees, using insider knowledge to trade, building fortunes with the Gordon Gekko morality of Ivan Bosky, or Bernard Madoff. The &quot;hidden hand&quot; in a Gekko marketplace is whatever you can get away with. Adam Smith said, &quot;People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.&quot; Humans conspire to win for advantage, but economic laws are not natural laws. Franklin D. Roosevelt said, &quot;But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. Economic laws are made by human beings.&quot; We can mix economic laws and justice without violating any law of nature. Neither conservative nor liberal politics can claim amoral nature independent of humanity implies their moral, political, and economic preference. Economic justice is a human artifact not the nature of the market place. <br /><br />Rapacious capitalism is free competition. Virtuous capitalism is cooperation. We invent the rules of cooperation so football does not become a war and we invent rules of war so war does not become genocide. Likewise we invent rules for competition so competition does not become free competition. Cooperative competition could creates market place rules consistent with liberal democracy and a large multicultural Bourgeois. A Bourgeois democracy is a conundrum of political and economic complications with academic freedom, a free press, and civil liberty for a culture that lets those who can, take care of themselves, and gives to those who cannot.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16530200833264327425noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848147048378033728.post-42269498457366254982013-08-29T18:05:48.668+02:002013-08-29T18:05:48.668+02:00I think you&#39;re arguing for a Smithian rather t...I think you&#39;re arguing for a Smithian rather than a Mandevillian political economy. I&#39;ve discussed Smith&#39;s ethical conception in a <a href="http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2011/10/recovering-adam-smiths-ethical.html" rel="nofollow">previous post</a>. You might also be interested in Deirdre McCloskey&#39;s argument for virtuous bourgeois capitalism (which I reviewed <a href="http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2010/12/i-bring-good-news-about-our-bourgeois.html" rel="nofollow">here</a>)<br /><br />Yet I&#39;m not really clear about what you expect of &#39;education&#39;. Is it about enhancing people&#39;s intellectual capabilities for ethical reasoning, or making people be good? I rather prefer the freedom of the former to the indoctrination implied by the latter.Squibblerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12653454225525892502noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848147048378033728.post-22175330716766877762013-08-22T23:04:17.707+02:002013-08-22T23:04:17.707+02:00If there&#39;s something we might call rapacious c...If there&#39;s something we might call <i>rapacious capitalism</i>, then arguably ipso facto there is something (not widely realized so far) we might call <i>virtuous capitalism</i>. Hear me out here. We&#39;d be best to say that the market as such is morally neutral; the property rights typically involved (evolved social institutions that have stood the test of time, a la a Hayekian analysis) are morally neutral. What&#39;s of interest here is the moral quality of the society in which (capitalistic) market institutions are embdedded, and/or the market participants themselves. The outcomes of market processes are only going to be as good or desirable as these background conditions themselves. (Market failures or coordination problems aren&#39;t typically the result of moral failings on the part of the market actors; how these problems are dealt with are dependent upon the quality of the societal background conditions, which depend on the moral qualities of the people in the society.) This leads to the all-important question for this discussion: How good might people become?<br /><br />This question doesn&#39;t assume a fixed disposition on the part of people to be only so reliably virtuous. It assumes some form of free will, that makes possible a moral transition like that made by Ebenezer Scrooge. (This is not to say that it could happen overnight in a great many cases, like it did with Scrooge. Most of us aren&#39;t visited by ghosts on Christmas Eve, yadda yadda.) However good markets per se are at solving whatever coordination problems, via the &quot;invisible hand&quot; or spontaneous ordering, if we have a society full of Scrooges and mind-numbed philistines, the market outcomes are going to reflect the way the society is itself - not all that attractive. Fortunately most human beings aren&#39;t Scrooge-like but do have some measure of empathetic reaction; and most people aren&#39;t so mind-numbed as not to recognize <i>at least some</i> aesthetic values or to recognize when and where exploitative (in a suitably defined sense) relationships are occurring.<br /><br />But to get all Socratic and Aristotelian now, many humans have some ways to go before they&#39;re cognitively independent and knowledgeable enough to really flourish and to improve societal institutions (individually and in concert) that serve as the background to markets. To do this would take some good amount of education, moral and otherwise. Education seems to be a major task that is far from easy to figure out and implement. (If it weren&#39;t so difficult, I think we&#39;d have seen major improvements in pretty much all societies by now.) But it&#39;s doable in principle, and if there&#39;s a key to sparking some educational revolution, we should be hard at work trying to find out what it is. But if (strike that; <i>since</i>) it is doable, then in principle we can end up with (capitalistic) markets that are characterized by actors generally doing the right thing, being responsive to aesthetic values, taking note of and objecting to rapacious tendencies, and so on. The key here is education, most likely in a systematic program along the lines proposed by the ancient Greeks, implemented in concert starting at young ages for the to-be-educated. Why hasn&#39;t this happened yet? Arguably because the people who would be in the position to do the educating (the adults) haven&#39;t been given the proper information, training and motivation themselves. But what better way to alleviate that problem than through the potentially-very-educational means of the internet? Now <i>that</i> is a variable that did not exist in history heretofore.<br /><br />The internet makes possible a gathering and integration of dispersed knowledge on a scale never before imagined. So now the key is to figure out how to use that technology to its maximum potential and really kick some philistine butt. :-)<br />Ultimate Philosopherhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04097520862033889365noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848147048378033728.post-48075034257326504522013-07-29T14:38:41.180+02:002013-07-29T14:38:41.180+02:00Yes, though I would have used another example. S...Yes, though I would have used another example. <br /><br />Sandel considers that transactional arrangements - such as paying children to read books or reselling free theatre tickets - corrupts their true moral purpose. Therefore he argues for regulating consensual transactional arrangements purely to protect the rest of us from their polluting effects. You are right that this privileges some people&#39;s moral views over others in a rather illiberal way.<br /><br />The kind of example Sandel might give would be that a child who sells his unwanted Christmas presents on Ebay would be degrading the meaning of Christmas and gift-giving for everyone.Squibblerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12653454225525892502noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848147048378033728.post-1769535818673776532013-07-28T12:02:54.903+02:002013-07-28T12:02:54.903+02:00Another criticism to Sander&#39;s arguments agains...Another criticism to Sander&#39;s arguments against market&#39;s corruption is that the judgement if something is corrupt or not is based on private preferences and values of individuals and not universally accepted beliefs. For example selling someone&#39;s childhood teddy bear is seen as a corrupting commercial act by the owner but for everyone else in society its a 2 dollar second-hand toy sale. Would you agree?nochancehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05408443029773399535noreply@blogger.com