Michael Sandel of Harvard teaches Government and, especially, justice, for which he is internationally known. His book is sweetly written, and offers a good occasion to examine the moral convictions of communitarians, and their distaste for the market.
One cannot but agree with Sandel that the study of markets should be remoralized. We should know why we believe, morally speaking, that bread should be allocated by a market but children should not. It's not enough to simply sneer, from left or right or middle. Even economists need to do the philosophical work. "Markets are not mere mechanisms," Sandel wisely observes.
By international standards the US poverty line of $23,050 corrected for exchange rates is around the average of world income, and is deemed a comfortably middle-class income in India. Why does the fact matter? Sandel says it is because Americans ignore the desperation of people earning $1 a day in Chad, and attend instead to the "unfairness" of charging for Shakespeare tickets of a show in Central Park.
It is a moral failure of communitarianism that it weighs on New Yorkers or Anglinos, our community, so much more above other poor people in the world, ignoring the good for Chadians or Bangladeshis that a commercial and innovative society would do. Sandel does not note that the introduction of free markets in Sahil-grown cotton (as against European and American protection for "our" farmers) or the reception of the First World's garbage (as Lawrence Summers once suggested in vulgar but sound reasoning) would ameliorate a most terrible lack of affordability. That is, Sandel does not face the actual, moral problem—which is poverty, real poverty, the depths. Instead he recommends that we fiddle with prices and create queues for Shakespeare in the Park.
The indirection—fiddling instead of solving—is morally indefensible. Fifty years ago the economists Milton Friedman on the right and James Tobin on the left suggested that we give at least the American poor a minimum income, and stop fiddling with the prices of housing and of bread and the like. It's a good moral idea, which the French have implemented. Poverty (at least State-side) would be alleviated, and markets would be left to do their job of making the social pie as large as possible. Such a separation of a policy about income from a policy about the market is a standard analytic ploy in economics. Sandel's teacher did not get it across to him.
In high theory the separation of welfare from allocation is called the Hicks-Kaldor Criterion, and is, to put it mildly, not above moral criticism. But to stride past the economic analysis is to ignore the actual moral problem—poverty—and its most direct solution. A New Yorker cartoon back in the 1960s showed a parked bank truck, with the guards handing money to people out of big sacks. Said one onlooker to another, "Well, at last the War on Poverty has gotten under way!" Yes. The comparable policy for the $1-a-day wretched of the earth is to allow capitalism to rip, which is what China has been doing since 1978 and India since 1991, with vastly more gain to the poor than from communitarian policies.
Note EU-Digest: extreme and opposite political and economic philosophies somewhat evenly divided in a country like the US is a recipe for disaster without the willingness to compromise.
Read more at Deirdre McCloskey: editorials
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