Everybody Poops (Peas and Gravy)

In yesterday's post on wagers, I casually asserted that attempts to combine the sacred and the profane is fingers on a chalkboard for regular folks. In my haste, I neglected to support this claim. Here is that support.

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

I think that even after you've read Sandel (and you should, he's as good as you're likely to get on the subject), you'll mostly agree with me that his claims are fundamentally aesthetic. But here's the difference you get with Sandel compared to a prototypical hand-wringing anti-capitalist: he makes normative claims about the extent of markets underpinned by rigorous positive aesthetic analysis. Whether Michael Sandel likes the idea of paying cash to see Shakespeare in the Park is not relevant to his argument, it's that he's (correctly, as far as I can tell) identified that ordinary people in their ordinary lives object to these sorts of arrangements.

Well, maybe ordinary folks don't care that much about Shakespeare per se, but let's not let that distract from the key point. Toddlers like their food touching about as much as grown-ups relish impersonal monetary transactions in deeply personal settings. We call it "tithing" and tell each other and ourselves that the geld goes to "God". Parishioner please. Economists are trained (and the good ones continue to hone this valuable skill) to peer through petticoats like these to the truth hidden beneath. We trade in sacred goods all the time, we just have a knack for calling it something else. TANSTAAFL.

A question then of values: the economist would have you swallow your discomfort, encourage you to simply and honestly acknowledge that incentives matter, that to get more of something you want, you must must must pay for it. The economist will also give you a laundry list of good, convincing reasons why impersonal voluntary exchange tends to be the most efficient way to trade. Hey-presto, job done, right? Everybody poops, so why just plainly and publicly acknowledge that and then get along with the business of business?

Or is this all just intolerably indecent? Am I a bad person for advocating for the legal (and marginally safer) trade in sexual services? Or for vigorous resale markets? I reject the notion that my own sentiments of disgust should be elevated to the realm of public policy; does this make me an ogre? Should I conform to the shared fib that denies that from all living buttocks emerge feces? Does that make for a better world? Is my position a minority one because it's just plain wrong? Prices are information, but maybe I'm totally wrong and it's sometimes more comfortable to dwell in ignorance.

Magic Mirror on the Wall, Who is the Most Euvoluntary of Them All?

Pity poor Narcissus. Not that he got turned into a flower, but that he had to suffer the backbreaking indignity of having to bend down to the surface of a still pond to enjoy his comely visage. The now-common mirror, a technology so dully prosaic that acne-ridden teenagers have them hanging (by magnets!) in their school lockers by the truckload, was utterly and completely beyond his ken. Yes, he indulged his vanity, but without the luxury of more easily avoiding sciatica.

Jason Brennan reviews Sandel at BHL, and forwards a very euvoluntary proposition: part of the civilizing effect of markets is that they enjoin a supply side effect: the information that prices give go (at least) two ways: they are necessary information for consumers to make inevitable tradeoffs, but let suppliers know what they should produce and where they should direct innovative talents. If everyone has to line up for a mirror, what incentive does the mirror-maker have to ply his trade?

I agree with Sandel wholeheartedly that there are lots and lots of exchanges that are well outside the realm of euvoluntary, but I also have to agree that making that set more comprehensive demands a system that best encourages craftsmen to lower their costs and make their wares available more widely.

Just think of how much more lovely the flower would be if he would have endured his divine punishment standing upright.

Evaluating Arguments by Attributing Motives

Jonathan Feit goes all post-modern on us, alleging that the motives behind the person making the argument, rather than the quality of the argument itself, is what philosophers should consider.

In fairness, it seems like *I* was the one who was tricked.  I have actually been converted to the belief that the usual definition of "voluntary" as the absence of coercion through direct human agency is inadequate.  It actually DOES matter that people are able to escape the coercion of circumstance, just like many philosophers of the left have argued.

Of course, I was only able to reach that conclusion because I evaluated the arguments themselves, and found them persuasive.  If I had stopped at the point where I just rejected the arguments because I disagreed with the motives of my opponents, I would never have learned anything.

In any case:  Michael Sandel, you were right and I was wrong.  Interesting.   

The Virgin Auctions

What would Sandel say? A 20 year old Brazilian woman auctions her virginity for a princely sum of US$780,000.

Moderately NSFW pictures in the link suggest she should have no trouble finding adequate suitors. Similarly, the Japanese gentleman who is willing to cough up more than a quarter million bucks for the experience is probably wealthy enough that his BATNA is not especially unattractive.

If there is exploitation here, who is exploiting whom?

The story suggests that the payment will be converted into a charitable payment. Is this dirty money? Is it akin to Planned Parenthood turning down a donation from infamous Internet bad boy Tucker Max or the Susan G. Komen Foundation distancing itself from support from online pornographers? Do the transactions that generate charitable donations contaminate the cash transfer? If so, how distant do the transactions have to be to become morally acceptable again?

Is there a villain here? More than one? Which is greatest? Is this auction non-euvoluntary? If so, why?

Markets in Everything: Sandel

The brillian Michael Sandel has an article in the April Atlantic that will be on my syllabus from now on. For the article...

Excerpt: We live in a time when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets—and market values—have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us.

As the Cold War ended, markets and market thinking enjoyed unrivaled prestige, and understandably so. No other mechanism for organizing the production and distribution of goods had proved as successful at generating affluence and prosperity. And yet even as growing numbers of countries around the world embraced market mechanisms in the operation of their economies, something else was happening. Market values were coming to play a greater and greater role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial domain. Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone. It increasingly governs the whole of life.

Nod to J-Ro, who is also brilliant.

Michael Sandel on Exchange

Okay, so I'm a little embarrassed. I clearly should have cited this before.

But better late than never. Michael Sandel makes an argument about when exchanges are not really voluntary:

The first objection [to the claim that exchange is voluntary] is an argument from coercion. It points to the injustice that can arise when people buy and sell things under conditions of severe inequality or dire economic necessity. According to this objection, market exchanges are not necessarily as voluntary as market enthusiasts suggest. A peasant may agree to sell his kidney or cornea in order to feed his starving family, but his agreement is not truly voluntary. He is coerced, in effect, by the necessities of his situation.

Wow. "Coerced by the necessities of his situation" sounds a lot like condition #6 here at the top right column of this blog, doesn't it. Awkward... Still, I'd like to think that the "disparities in BATNAs" definition gives it a bit more precision.

The second objection is to "corruption," where buying and selling changes human relationships in bad ways. (If you tell your spouse, "Hey, honey, you were great in bed last night! Here's an extra $20!" then that is not really good for the relationship.) (An extra $200,000, instead of $20, might create considerable enthusiasm, but it would not be authentic and would still corrupt the underlying relationship.) Some things can be commodoties and others cannot.

ATSRTWT, by all means.