Zink

Gustafson cites a memo former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers wrote when he worked at the World Bank, in which Summers argued that rich countries should export pollution to poorer ones on the grounds that it would do less economic damage because the economies were smaller. The example demonstrates how when market-based thinking is dominant, the only relevant measure of utility is money and financial value. Cox agrees: “The relentless metrics of the monetary have filtered into our thinking about virtually everything.”3 These themes are addressed at length by the Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel in his book What Money Can’t Buy. While Sandel is not writing from a religious perspective, he has much in common with Cox and Gustafson. Unlike Cox or Gustafson, Sandel has a clear and consistent focus on a single time period. The last three decades have seen the intrusion of markets and market values into ever more areas of our life: “Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone but increasingly governs the whole of life.”4 He distinguishes between having a market economy— largely a good thing—and being a market society, in which markets are used to allocate goods like health, education, public safety, recreation, and procreation in a way that would have been unimaginable a generation or two earlier. While he does not explicitly pursue the claim that the market is a god, he does write of a “market faith,” which has led to the expansion of “market values into spheres of life where they don’t belong.”5 Sandel is a philosopher, not a theologian. He is comfortable talking about morality and rightly critiques the emptiness of public discourse: “The problem with our politics is not too much moral argument but too little. Our politics is overheated because it is mostly vacant, empty of moral and spiritual content. It fails to engage with big questions 3 Cox, The Market as God, 180. 4 Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 6. 5 Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy, 7. The Deified Market 323 people care about.”6 He argues that the absence of moral argument is precisely what the market wants. Markets claim not to pass judgments but merely to respond to preferences and create incentives. Yet in doing so they are implicitly engaging in acts of judgment, including judgments regarding the propriety of ceding ever-expanding areas of our lives to the market’s domain, claiming all preferences are equally worthwhile, and all incentives are morally appropriate. Indeed, one might argue that the market is exceedingly clear and consistent about its implicit judgments: the only “value” that matters is the price produced when market mechanisms are introduced. The trouble with Sandel is that his discussion of morality remains abstract. Toward the end of the book, he argues that the debate societies need to have is about the limits of markets. That question can not be answered “without deliberating about the meaning and purpose of goods, and the values that should govern them.”7 Just where this meaning and purpose and value should come from is unclear. He skirts around spirituality and religion, but that there is a role for people of faith in these deliberations seems obvious. Sandel can call for the importance of a debate about morality, but the nature and source of the values to be debated is left unclear. Two books show that these same debates are taking place in the United Kingdom. David Marquand’s Mammon’s Kingdom is a thoroughgoing demolishment of English society in the 2010s. For him, England is a “market fundamentalist” world in which a “strange, new Holy Trinity” is worshiped: Choice, Freedom, and the Individual.8 The dominance of economic relations has meant the diminishment of the public sphere and the disappearance of public goods. That is a problem: “without a robust and confident public realm to complement them, the private and market realms are likely to become nests of predators, preying on those who lack influence or market power.”

Jesse Zink