The sub-title that Debra Satz, a professor of ethics at Stanford, gave to this was copied by Michael Sandel, similarly employed at Harvard, in "What Money Can't Buy" a year or so later. Your reviewer loved the latter, and this steered her to the present volume, which is more encompassing and more demanding. In short, it is excellent.
Satz emphasises that the text is normative (philosophy, ethics) not allocative or explanatory (efficiency, economics). However she misleads a little with this, because the two quickly get inter-twined. The type of allocative mechanism used to distribute something changes its moral standing in highly predictable and durable ways. And this rebounds on the economics, causing the equilibrium distribution to shift. So the study is of both, but majoring on the ethical.
But the author is spot-on in emphasising early on that market and state can't be separated, even if there was a hint that allocative and normative can. This is because of the non-tradable background conditions without which exchange tends not to take place. The point here is to head off opposition to any intervention in Paretian optimisation (where any trade that improves the lot of both parties is OK) and/or Kaldor-Hicks optimisation (a relaxation of the preceding where the winner compensates to loser to fix it).
This isn't the main deal for the author though. Preference satisfaction as a metric of market merit falls short. Adam Smith noted the ability of market arrangements to shape preferences, rendering it circular to appeal to their ability to then satisfy these preferences correctly. David Ricardo and Karl Marx asserted that capitalism exists in essence due to workers having nothing to sell other than labour. Satz eloquently channels the substance of these thinkers into an exposition of the deficiencies of the (neo-classical) marginal revoution, that flattened and more-or-less dispensed with social relationships in economics. It is a pity that the author doesn't quite hit on this development as the shift in the axis of egalitarianism that it actually is--from equality of various social desiderata--to equality of marginal price, utility, gain, loss . . . (everything), as the unifying concept behind much laisser-fairism. So your reviewer would add this point. She (reviewer, not author) would also suggest that the main attraction of market commodification of more and more probably lies in its synonymy with movement from specific to general.
That, however, is misleading, says Satz, as it would imply that the inclusion of more and more into a market structure entails encompassing all of how it was distributed before. And this isn't what happens. Primarily--says Satz--a market exchange can undermine conditions by which individuals act as equals in respect of moral standing. This means equals with respect to agency, exit, inalienability of personhood and (more loosely) bargaining power. This seems more relevant for forward markets with time inconsistency--her classic example being tickets sold for the Titanic's maiden voyage that lack lifeboat eligibility. Here, regardless of the equality or othewise of passenger starting wealth, and regardless of completeness or otherwise of true risk knowledge, the event that the state should block is that of a wreck in which drowning steerage passengers would have their tragic choice enforced against them, which renders their personhood alienable, among other ills.
This is one of four "noxious" attributes that the author sets out in detail as qualities that may (not do) make the case for market blocking. She would term it "extreme harm to society", (meaning the debasement of basic equal inalienabilities that would occur with people pushing others out of scarce lifeboats). The other three are extreme harm to individuals (the logic here is that any individual's ability to contract away her interests should have a paternalistic-imposed limit), weak agency (the deficiency in a person's standing in respect of her presence at the negotiating exchange--think child labour, or the chickens coming home to roost on the cost to the unborn of defined benefit social security), and extreme vulnerability (which seems to be about breaching a comfort-level of bargaining power asymmetry).
In focusing on these arguments of what makes markets noxious, the author blows away some outcome-oriented objections often made. Because these could be addressed by restrictions to, say, indemnify vulnerabilities or increase agency--such as providing exit (non-enforcability) to some contracts. She also challenges the inconsistency of other criticisms levelled at markets (such as prostitution or contract pregnancy) but not at others (such as flight attendants and volunteer military service). In several cases Satz cannot find any route through her noxiousness filter to allow a market at all (such as in democratic voting). In others she concludes regulation (sexual labour). There is useful acknowledgement that one should not lose sight of the upside of market distribution (such as increased supply, and life-saving, as may be likely with kidney selling), despite noxious attributes.
All intervention would be open to challenge from a staunch libertarian standpoint, Satz notes, where starting conditions are almost all assumed to be fair. But the latter is not water-tight, because of the Lockean proviso against justice in acquisition ("don't take the last one"). And as this reviewer pointed out in her write-up of "Anarchy State and Utopia" (Nozick), by backward induction (a paradox of sorts), that implies not taking the first one either. Which is an apposite reminder that not so much of this stuff can be separated.
Satz emphasises that the text is normative (philosophy, ethics) not allocative or explanatory (efficiency, economics). However she misleads a little with this, because the two quickly get inter-twined. The type of allocative mechanism used to distribute something changes its moral standing in highly predictable and durable ways. And this rebounds on the economics, causing the equilibrium distribution to shift. So the study is of both, but majoring on the ethical.
But the author is spot-on in emphasising early on that market and state can't be separated, even if there was a hint that allocative and normative can. This is because of the non-tradable background conditions without which exchange tends not to take place. The point here is to head off opposition to any intervention in Paretian optimisation (where any trade that improves the lot of both parties is OK) and/or Kaldor-Hicks optimisation (a relaxation of the preceding where the winner compensates to loser to fix it).
This isn't the main deal for the author though. Preference satisfaction as a metric of market merit falls short. Adam Smith noted the ability of market arrangements to shape preferences, rendering it circular to appeal to their ability to then satisfy these preferences correctly. David Ricardo and Karl Marx asserted that capitalism exists in essence due to workers having nothing to sell other than labour. Satz eloquently channels the substance of these thinkers into an exposition of the deficiencies of the (neo-classical) marginal revoution, that flattened and more-or-less dispensed with social relationships in economics. It is a pity that the author doesn't quite hit on this development as the shift in the axis of egalitarianism that it actually is--from equality of various social desiderata--to equality of marginal price, utility, gain, loss . . . (everything), as the unifying concept behind much laisser-fairism. So your reviewer would add this point. She (reviewer, not author) would also suggest that the main attraction of market commodification of more and more probably lies in its synonymy with movement from specific to general.
That, however, is misleading, says Satz, as it would imply that the inclusion of more and more into a market structure entails encompassing all of how it was distributed before. And this isn't what happens. Primarily--says Satz--a market exchange can undermine conditions by which individuals act as equals in respect of moral standing. This means equals with respect to agency, exit, inalienability of personhood and (more loosely) bargaining power. This seems more relevant for forward markets with time inconsistency--her classic example being tickets sold for the Titanic's maiden voyage that lack lifeboat eligibility. Here, regardless of the equality or othewise of passenger starting wealth, and regardless of completeness or otherwise of true risk knowledge, the event that the state should block is that of a wreck in which drowning steerage passengers would have their tragic choice enforced against them, which renders their personhood alienable, among other ills.
This is one of four "noxious" attributes that the author sets out in detail as qualities that may (not do) make the case for market blocking. She would term it "extreme harm to society", (meaning the debasement of basic equal inalienabilities that would occur with people pushing others out of scarce lifeboats). The other three are extreme harm to individuals (the logic here is that any individual's ability to contract away her interests should have a paternalistic-imposed limit), weak agency (the deficiency in a person's standing in respect of her presence at the negotiating exchange--think child labour, or the chickens coming home to roost on the cost to the unborn of defined benefit social security), and extreme vulnerability (which seems to be about breaching a comfort-level of bargaining power asymmetry).
In focusing on these arguments of what makes markets noxious, the author blows away some outcome-oriented objections often made. Because these could be addressed by restrictions to, say, indemnify vulnerabilities or increase agency--such as providing exit (non-enforcability) to some contracts. She also challenges the inconsistency of other criticisms levelled at markets (such as prostitution or contract pregnancy) but not at others (such as flight attendants and volunteer military service). In several cases Satz cannot find any route through her noxiousness filter to allow a market at all (such as in democratic voting). In others she concludes regulation (sexual labour). There is useful acknowledgement that one should not lose sight of the upside of market distribution (such as increased supply, and life-saving, as may be likely with kidney selling), despite noxious attributes.
All intervention would be open to challenge from a staunch libertarian standpoint, Satz notes, where starting conditions are almost all assumed to be fair. But the latter is not water-tight, because of the Lockean proviso against justice in acquisition ("don't take the last one"). And as this reviewer pointed out in her write-up of "Anarchy State and Utopia" (Nozick), by backward induction (a paradox of sorts), that implies not taking the first one either. Which is an apposite reminder that not so much of this stuff can be separated.
