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

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

My understanding and thoughts are as follows:

Democracy does not necessarily need or even realize perfect equality, but people should share their common lives. After those who are from different origins and social status encounter, have conflicts of interest, work out differences, and accept the difference in everyday life, they finally respect "bonum commune."

Issues of markets are how we want to live together.

[A] Markets are powerful information gathering devices which can efficiently and effectively collect diffused and/or hidden information in a timely manner. It also "digests" future forecasts. Pressure from bureaucrats, politicians, and a part of market participants cannot distort information in the long run. It is the most efficient system to generate and assign goods / money.

[B] However, if evertthing is traded in markets and the way of thinking in markets intrude into every activity, it makes people nervous. It is due to the concepts of "enforcement," "unfairness," "corruption," and "decadence." Some people believe in virtue of a moralistic kind.

The difference between what we can buy and what we cannot buy:
[A] Something with marketable and economic value. Private assets.
[B] Something with non-market and moral value. Public assets.
Market value can possibly squeeze out non-maket, moral norm.

We should not heavily depend on moral value, that is, altruism, generosity, solidarity, and civic duties; these virtues are precious resource which can be easily deleted.
Markets are dependent on personal egoism and self-interest. It avoids using limited virtues. If you want to save limited precious resources, you have to be less dependent on moral and more dependent on markets.

A modern political controversy is mostly sparked between the following two kinds of people:
[A] Free-marketeers
[B] Those who insist that if and only if the society assures fairness, the selection in the markets is freely doable on an equal footing.

In the era when the gap widens, if everything is valued and traded in markets, those who are rich get much more rich and those who are poor become much poorer. It could be rare that people from different jobs and social status meet.

It is necessary to think and ask what kind of society we would like to live in.