## Metadata - Author: [[Michael J. Sandel]] - Full Title: What Money Can't Buy - Category: #books ## Highlights - We often associate corruption with ill-gotten gains. But corruption refers to more than bribes and illicit payments. To corrupt a good or a social practice is to degrade it, to treat it according to a lower mode of valuation than is appropriate to it. Charging admission to congressional hearings is a form of corruption in this sense. It treats Congress as if it were a business rather than an institution of representative government. ([Location 499](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=499)) - What is the difference between a fine and a fee? It’s worth pondering the distinction. Fines register moral disapproval, whereas fees are simply prices that imply no moral judgment. ([Location 936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=936)) - I do not claim that promoting virtuous attitudes toward the environment, or parenting, or education must always trump competing considerations. Bribery sometimes works. And it may, on occasion, be the right thing to do. If paying underachieving kids to read books brings a dramatic improvement in reading skills, we might decide to try it, hoping we can teach them to love learning later. But it is important to remember that it is bribery we are engaged in, a morally compromised practice that substitutes a lower norm (reading to make money) for a higher one (reading for the love of it). ([Location 1140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=1140)) - These two kinds of arguments reverberate through debates about what money should and should not buy. The fairness objection asks about the inequality that market choices may reflect; the corruption objection asks about the attitudes and norms that market relations may damage or dissolve.23 ([Location 1612](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=1612)) - “The ways in which society organizes and structures its social institutions—and particularly its health and welfare systems—can encourage or discourage the altruistic in man; such systems can foster integration or alienation; they can allow the ‘theme of the gift’—of generosity towards strangers—to spread among and between social groups and generations.” At some point, Titmuss worried, market-driven societies might become so inhospitable to altruism that they could be said to impair the freedom of persons to give. The “commercialization of blood and donor relationships represses the expression of altruism,” he concluded, and “erodes the sense of community.” ([Location 1823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=1823)) - The title of Robertson’s lecture was a question: “What does the economist economize?” He sought to show that, despite catering to “the aggressive and acquisitive instincts” of human beings, economists nonetheless serve a moral mission.47 Robertson began by conceding that economics, concerned as it is with the desire for gain, does not deal with the noblest human motives. “It is for the preacher, lay or clerical,” to inculcate the higher virtues—altruism, benevolence, generosity, solidarity, and civic duty. “It is the humbler, and often the invidious, role of the economist to help, so far as he can, in reducing the preacher’s task to manageable dimensions.”48 How does the economist help? By promoting policies that rely, whenever possible, on self-interest rather than altruism or moral considerations, the economist saves society from squandering its scarce supply of virtue. “If we economists do [our] business well,” Robertson concludes, “we can, I believe, contribute mightily to the economizing … of that scarce resource Love,” the “most precious thing in the world.” ([Location 1867](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=1867)) - Aristotle taught that virtue is something we cultivate with practice: “we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” ([Location 1885](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=1885)) - Rousseau held a similar view. The more a country asks of its citizens, the greater their devotion to it. “In a well-ordered city every man flies to the assemblies.” Under a bad government, no one participates in public life “because no one is interested in what happens there” and “domestic cares are all-absorbing.” Civic virtue is built up, not spent down, by strenuous citizenship. Use it or lose it, Rousseau says, in effect. “As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the state is not far from its fall.” ([Location 1887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=1887)) - Few workers were aware that their companies had put a price on their heads. Most states did not require a company to inform employees when it bought insurance on their lives, or to ask workers’ permission to do so. And most COLI policies remained in effect even after a worker quit, retired, or was fired. So corporations were able to collect death benefits on employees who died years after leaving the company. Companies kept track of the mortality of their former employees through the Social Security Administration. In some states, companies could even take out life insurance and collect death benefits on the children and spouses of their employees.7 Janitors insurance was especially popular among big banks, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. In the late 1990s, some banks explored the idea of going beyond their employees and taking out insurance on the lives of their depositors and credit-card holders. ([Location 1952](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=1952)) - By the early 2000s, COLI policies covered the lives of millions of workers and accounted for 25 to 30 percent of all life insurance sales. In 2006, Congress sought to limit janitors insurance by enacting a law that required employee consent and restricted company-owned insurance to the highest-paid one-third of a firm’s workforce. But the practice continued. By 2008, U.S. banks alone held $122 billion in life insurance on their employees. ([Location 1967](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=1967)) - One viatical investor was Warren Chisum, a conservative Texas state legislator and “well-known crusader against homosexuality.” He led a successful effort to reinstate criminal penalties for sodomy in Texas, opposed sex education, and voted against programs to help AIDS victims. In 1994, Chisum proudly proclaimed that he had invested $200,000 to buy the life insurance policies of six AIDS victims. “My gamble is that it’ll make not less than 17 percent and sometimes considerably better,” he told The Houston Post. “If they die in one month, you know, they [the investments] do really good.”20 Some accused the Texas lawmaker of voting for policies from which he stood to profit personally. But this charge was misdirected; his money was following his convictions, not the other way around. This was no classic conflict of interest. It was actually something worse—a morally twisted version of socially conscious investing. ([Location 2059](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=2059)) - Life insurance has always been two things in one: a pooling of risk for mutual security, and a grim wager, a hedge against death. These two aspects coexist in uneasy combination. In the absence of moral norms and legal restraints, the wagering aspect threatens to swamp the social purpose that justifies life insurance in the first place. When the social purpose is lost or obscured, the fragile lines separating insurance, investment, and gambling come undone. Life insurance devolves from an institution to provide security for one’s survivors into just another financial product and, finally, into a gamble on death that serves no good beyond the fun and profit of those who play the game. The death pool, frivolous and marginal though it seems, is actually the dark twin of life insurance—the wager without the redeeming social good. ([Location 2115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=2115)) - For life insurance to become a morally legitimate business, it had to be disentangled from financial speculation. This was finally achieved with the enactment of the Assurance Act of 1774 (also called the Gambling Act). The law banned gambling on the lives of strangers and restricted life insurance to those who had an “insurable interest” in the person whose life they were insuring. Since an unfettered life insurance market had led to “a mischievous kind of gaming,” parliament now prohibited all insurance on lives “except in cases where the persons insuring shall have an interest in the life or death of the persons insured.” “Simply put,” writes the historian Geoffrey Clark, “the Gambling Act limited the extent to which human life could be converted into a commodity.” ([Location 2163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=2163)) - making markets more efficient is no virtue in itself. The real question is whether introducing this or that market mechanism will improve or impair the good of the game. It’s a question worth asking not only of baseball but also of the societies in which we live. ([Location 2686](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=2686)) - This is the ultimate captive audience.” ([Location 2955](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=2955)) - Students could learn about nutrition from curricular materials supplied by Hershey’s Chocolate or McDonald’s, or study the effects of an Alaska oil spill in a video made by Exxon. Procter & Gamble offered an environmental curriculum that explained why disposable diapers were good for the earth. ([Location 2977](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=2977)) - the Campbell Soup Company sent out a free science kit that purported to teach the scientific method. With the use of a slotted spoon (included in the kit), students were shown how to prove that Campbell’s Prego spaghetti sauce was thicker than Ragú, the rival brand. General Mills sent teachers a science curriculum on volcanoes called “Gushers: Wonders of the Earth.” The kit included free samples of its Fruit Gushers candy, with soft centers that “gushed” when bitten. The teacher’s guide suggested that students bite into the Gushers and compare the effect to a geothermal eruption. A Tootsie Roll kit showed how third graders could practice math by counting Tootsie Rolls. For a writing assignment, it recommended that children interview family members about their memories of Tootsie Rolls. ([Location 2986](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=2986)) - It isn’t easy to teach students to be citizens, capable of thinking critically about the world around them, when so much of childhood consists of basic training for a consumer society. At a time when many children come to school as walking billboards of logos and labels and licensed apparel, it is all the more difficult—and all the more important—for schools to create some distance from a popular culture steeped in the ethos of consumerism. ([Location 3020](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=3020)) - People disagree about the meaning of books, bodies, and schools, and how they should be valued. In fact, we disagree about the norms appropriate to many of the domains that markets have invaded—family life, friendship, sex, procreation, health, education, nature, art, citizenship, sports, and the way we contend with the prospect of death. But that’s my point: once we see that markets and commerce change the character of the goods they touch, we have to ask where markets belong—and where they don’t. And we can’t answer this question without deliberating about the meaning and purpose of goods, and the values that should govern them. ([Location 3039](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00633PFQC&location=3039))