Hardinge Park bus stand in Patna is the place where buses of all shapes and sizes leave for all sorts of destinations in Bihar and adjoining states. As all college students of our generation in the city knew, summer mornings have to be reserved for standing in the queue for the mama or the chacha, often with their families in tow, to land up at more earthly hours to take their seat in the bus. If there was no one in the family to stand under the baking sun, one hired (but without money) the services of the son of the neighbour, the landlords? offspring or even a long-lost relative from the town.
The queues each student learnt to jump in cities across India and possibly across large swathes of South Asia then date back to the time when buses began to ply across dusty roads beyond towns, certainly decades before the current round of globalisation of the last 20 years. Queue-jumping for buses, at hospitals for outpatient services, and for just about anything is what a capital-starved nation taught all of us to practice. And still teaches, wherever the state doles out services in measly drops.
One was reminded of this fragment from the past while reading Michael Sandel?s What Money Can?t Buy. Sandel is disturbed by the question of whether every human action can be understood in the image of the market. Specifically, he analyses whether monetary incentives should decide even non-tradable items like human relations and provision of public goods. ?To a remarkable degree, the last few decades have witnessed the remaking of social relations in the image of market relations,? he claims. The well-heeled, he rightly says, jump queues. True, except that they have always jumped queues or made money out of insuring others? lives. As the Indian examples will show, this was true even when India had not discovered markets.
The dissonance that occurs in Sandel?s highly readable book is between the examples arranged to incite moral repugnance and the thesis he propagates. Take the queue-jumping phenomena itself. If it has become more prevalent in the US, as he claims, in countries like India it has withdrawn in many areas where markets have become more efficient.
Ultimate queue-busting happened here when the railway reservations system was reformed in the late 1980s. Till then, a relative working in the railways was a treasure trove that families literally guarded zealously. It was the advent of mechanised reservation that broke India?s suspicion of computers and created a market-based booking system, which gave everyone a reasonably fair chance to board a train without being scalped.
Or take what Sandel calls health bribes: the monetary incentives to solve social problems. Observing the results of the anti-smoking campaign, he says these are morally debilitating. However, to those battling the spread of TB in Southeast Asia or spreading the use of iodised salt to check goitre among populations where even the slightest change in income marks the difference between eating and starving, this line of thought would seem outlandish.
Sandel is not able to clearly distinguish between objects that come up as a marketable commodity and those that do not. For instance, he is deeply concerned about the commodification of baseball and other American sports. Every piece of game detritus, right down to used chewing gum it would seem, is up for sale. At the same time, there is no evidence that anyone who bought this was forced to do so. It is the ultimate economics puzzle. A Shakespeare first folio is not valuable despite a limited supply, unless the buyers say so.
Sandel is able to show that a market can be created for weird things with apparent ease. He is able to highlight cases like that of a Swiss community, which is asked to choose between burying radioactive waste as a public duty or for a monetary inducement, where the market-based offer does not produce the best result.
But here is a conundrum. Land is needed by industries in India to expand. Yet, in the early days of independence, the land-losers were showered with a spiel about public duty and made to abandon their land. But now, with a robust market in land developing across most of India, communities are demanding adequate compensation. Using the logic offered by Sandel, the former will be preferable. It is obvious that his argument that a market-based economy often undermines democracy is very suspect in the larger non-American universe.
Ever since Adam Smith wrote in Wealth of Nations that it is not altruism but self-interest that drives the rules of exchange between individuals, communities and nations, philosophers have expressed concern at the stark conclusion. Sandel?s book is a highly readable addition to this second line of thought. But he does not build a theory of an alternative pricing model where abnegation of self-interest can be made a key variable. He does not explain whether the choices he highlights will not occur in a non-market environment. For instance, a market for human organs is distasteful, but this is not the basic question for a man forced to sell his kidney or the woman forced to sell her womb by poverty, which is the more distasteful condition. That market has always existed in the deprived nations in this part of the world. In the densely populated countries of Asia and Africa, it is the controlled economies in which governments have for long decided the limits of markets where these markets for organs and wombs have flourished. To the extent that a new market economy has spread across the globe and provided outlets for the poor to escape poverty, it has become possible that such gut-wrenching (pun intended) markets won?t be omnipresent.
It is a truism that there some spheres of human action should be beyond the limits of market-led engagements. But from here Sandel does not take us on to the logical next step, of outlining a theory of what markets can and cannot buy.