Market Society [1]: Introduction
Markets and their discontents
In January of last year, I went on a trip with a few friends from college to Austria. This was a very moving vacation for me as a fan of both The Grand Budapest Hotel and pancakes. Part of our trip was going to the Alps for skiing and saunaing, which gave me some great opportunities to quote Kramer (with my friends playing along to the script perfectly!). While there, we met a family one of my college friends knew from growing up. The father had grown up in Switzerland, so we got to hear a bit about the area. One bout of exploring took us to a fondue dinner, where an interesting cultural difference came up.
While we were eating, one of my friends said he was surprised that such a nice restaurant as this would have such reasonable prices. My stomach gurgled not so much in agreement as in a sort of grass-like stress signal to other stomachs in the vicinity, presumably in protest to the oppressive diktats of my taste buds. The father of our host family explained that in Austria and Switzerland, it is common for restaurants of various social distinctions to have similar prices, but different clienteles. People generally know which sorts of restaurants they belong in — a worker simply would not go to the same restaurant as a high-flying corporate vacationer, even though they could likely pay the prices on the menu.
My friend expressed to me that this seemed much more egalitarian than the way we tended to do it in the US. Rather than the glamorous celebrity social media posts and in-your-face import of “oh if only I could get in there,” everyone had their place and kept to their place, and people mostly had the ability to pay various menu prices. I wasn’t so sure. Sure, the differentiation was less ostentatious and less market-oriented, but it was still there. Someone was accepted, and someone else was quietly pushed away. The dollars on the menu (or the planning and time necessary to get a reservation) didn’t do it, but something did. In fact, it seemed like the Austrian model might be less egalitarian. At least there was a pleasant bluntness and forthrightness to the way the market decided: the test was right there, in numerical form. Could you pass? Sure, some people might not go through the effort (or have the resources), but at least the test was right there, the success criterion clear.
Search Engine, a podcast by PJ Vogt, recently did a two-part series on Berlin’s nightclub scene. In it, they marvel at the way Berghain, a cornerstone of Berlin’s nightclubs and known to be extremely exclusive, will say “no” to celebrities and “yes” to… well, no one quite knows to whom exactly they say yes. The bouncer, Sven, will take a look at you, ask you one or two questions, and then silently point you to the street or to the entrance. One of my housemates from Denver knows a few people who have gotten into Berghain, but, supposedly, Elon Musk got turned away.
This is, obviously, not egalitarian. There is a “no,” a rejection. Someone gets let in and someone else doesn’t, and a third someone decides which is which. At least, we might say, with the market, the rules are right there: this much money, and you’re in. With a bouncer, a vibe, an acculturation? What if someone in the Austrian Alps really wants to try the kaiserschmarrn of the most decorous restaurant in town? What if they’re willing to save up for it? For a month, two, maybe even three? At least if it was just a price, they could do it.
Minor spoilers for season 2 of The Bear in this paragraph. There’s a scene in The Bear where Richie, the soon-to-be head of the front of house for the titular restaurant of the series, is learning that it’s not cringe to be good at your job. Or it’s not cringe to be fancy and good at your job. Whatever. Richie works for a short stint at Ever, an incredibly sophisticated restaurant trying to beat an unreasonably high quality of hospitality into his resistant, commonsense southside skull. During this time, he attends a pre-service meeting where the staff is going over Persons of Note. A piece of advice for sophisticates or those serving them: always keep the jargon 1-2 steps ahead of common parlance. VIPs are for replaceable managers; PONs are for necessary professionals. Anyway, his ears perk up a bit when he hears mentioned among the PONs a couple of high school teachers who had posted on Instagram about how they had saved up a bunch of money and were incredibly excited to go to one of the fanciest restaurants in the world. They emphasize that this party will be treated to a special evening as a response to this show of appreciation for the restaurant’s craft, and it’s a nice moment all things considered.
The teachers may have saved up for three, four months, maybe even a year for a night that some blowhard executive might throw down to impress his mistress. They had to choose between a single meal and, say, a sorely needed weeklong vacation. The executive chose between the meal and having a slightly higher number in his bank account. That's not exactly egalitarian. But, to take the other side of the case, you can’t learn manners in months or even a year. You can’t get to know the right people and learn to dress the right way while also working your day job and keeping all your current social relationships intact. One becomes sophisticated in periods of decades if not generations — months is the wrong timeframe by multiple orders of magnitude.1
Nonetheless, the nightclub is, if nothing else, quite refreshing. Everyone in the nightclub was chosen to be there. Not because they had money, but because they knew (or fit) what the nightclub meant. They were the right sort of person — they had the right look, the right sense, the right manners. It’s a place for people that elsewhere would be called weirdos that has remained that even as it has become world-famous. You can’t really do that if you’re letting anyone in with enough money.
And on the other side of the door, sure, you might get rejected from Berghain (I am almost certain that I would), but at least one of the richest men in the world did as well. There is a satisfaction in that, perhaps. Let him feel such a sting. Might be good for him. He has won the market, but why should that get him everything? Let someone say no to him, even if the market will always say yes. Money will have its place, but isn’t it nice for there to be a time when it does not have final say? An actual person on the other side saying no for once, with all the quirks and inequities and biases that entails? Rather than the cold hard fist of the market?
Everyone Is Talking about Neoliberalism
In the last 5 or 10 years, it has become fashionable to pin any sort of economic or social ill relating at least in the most tenuous sense to the role of money and markets in society on neoliberalism. In a shocking display of national unity, both TikTok leftists and America First ‘think’ tank operators are calling for America to move past it, whatever that means. Here, neoliberalism joins terms like intersectionality in shifting sharply during their march from academia to public political parlance. ‘Neoliberalism,’ as a concept, has been revived in the academy multiple times, each time for a different reason and with different content, sort of like The Avengers. Also sort of like The Avengers, it has become somewhat rote. Also also like The Avengers, the fact that it has been revived so many times can make it difficult to talk about if you are not specific about whose Avengers you are talking about. So I don’t want to really get into the quagmire of what neoliberalism should mean or how it can be used and misused — that’s a slog for another day, if Matt Yglesias doesn’t beat me to it. However, there is one version of neoliberalism that gives a sort of sense of what we are talking about here.
Sometimes, when people talk about neoliberalism, they’re talking about trade agreements, deregulating airlines, and farming out government functions to nonprofits. This is an interesting, if often misguided, conceptual construction. Related, but distinct, to this bundle of policies is the hazier, more cultural notion of neoliberalism.
Recent human history has featured — arguably starred — the continual conquest of the market. Not only can you buy oranges in winter, but you can even buy them on Sundays and from foreigners at reasonable prices (in fact, at better prices than you have ever been able to buy them at before). Money buys more and more things in large part because we’ve gotten a lot better at making things and transporting them, but also in part because we have loosened a lot of restrictions on what money can buy and when. We can purchase oranges, sure, but we can also purchase the ability to board first on airplanes and be a citizen of several different countries. There are scores of services and premium versions of things which have a decent amount of their value proposition come down to “you won’t be near middle class people.” Should there be extraordinarily expensive skyboxes at baseball games? Should we let people buy votes?
These examples span levels of seriousness and distastefulness wildly, so consider where your lines are. In every one of these exchanges there would be (at least) two people willingly providing funds or goods/services, each believing that they will be better off after the transaction ends. Should people be able to buy and sell kidneys? Other organs? Limbs? Are kissing booths harmless fun or perverting an act of intimacy? How about buying sex? Pregnancy? Elder care? Should we be able to purchase babies? Human beings? Which drugs should people be able to buy? Should people be able to buy restaurant reservations? Should the government be able to sell the right to prosecute a criminal punishment? Should you be able to buy more schooling? Better schooling? Should we auction off a few seats in the freshman class of certain selective universities and pay other students’ tuition with the money?
The point is not that we need to reign in markets — it’s that these are difficult questions. The point, eventually, is this: should you be able to buy your way into Berghain?
It’s a Free Country, Why Not Do it All?
The neoliberal bogeyman is supposed to say that everything should be markets. Not just an impulse towards private enterprise and away from government largesse/welfare, but a sense that markets are the natural order of things and deviations from that norm must be justified. Or, more strongly, that the market is a model for society, rather than a tool for it. Here is where I am legally obligated to trot out the reference to a movie I have never seen and link Gekko’s “Greed is Good” speech from Wall Street. The idea is that the market is smarter than you, you don’t get to say what other people can do, and, if you tried, you would end up evil or a failure or both. If two people want to exchange money for a good or service, you don’t get to tell them no, and if the market says that a restaurant reservation is worth $60, then that’s just markets clearing.
There is an orthodox economist response as to why one might not allow a market transaction even if both parties executing it are happy with the outcome: externalities. Externalities occur when the transaction itself affects others who do not have a say in the transaction, and therefore are taking on a cost (external to the transaction) that is not reflected in the cost of the transaction itself. The classic example is carbon emissions, but you can talk about toxic trash dumping, hunting endangered animals, and even noisy concerts. There are also positive externalities, like those relating to R&D, but that is not quite so material here.
This is all well and good and an important mode of economic thinking, but the issue is that it is still economic thinking: the problems and solutions are all solvable through market forces. Tax carbon emissions, give local residents property rights to the relevant wildlife or environmental quality, and you’re done. The uneasiness towards the marketization of everything requires the ability to criticize the transaction of an object qua transaction — to criticize that it is involved in a market at all. Generally, I see two sorts of arguments play out in this context:
The argument from coercion: there is a sense in which the possibility of a market transaction is somehow exploitative or coercive for those who are poor. E.g., worries that prostitution could exploit poor women into feeling forced into selling their bodies.
The argument from corruption: there is some quality about certain acts or objects that leaves them demeaned by transacting them for money. E.g., worries that prostitution demeans and corrupts a felt intimate or special (or holy) nature to sex.
It seems to me that Americans to the left-of-center are generally far more comfortable with using arguments of type 1 than 2. My guess would be this is at least in part because of the history of arguments of type 2 being used by religious conservatives in defense of bad political positions like miscegenation laws and opposition to gay rights (and, for some people, it might be because of the weird turn a corner of leftism has made into thinking that there should be no standards for behavior anywhere on anyone ever). “Two consenting adults” and all that. Michael Sandel started fighting the good fight in trying to get liberals to think in this mode about ten years ago with his book Market Society (a podcast about it here), but I don’t think it has made a huge dent.
It also seems to me that Americans to the right-of-center are generally far more comfortable with using arguments of type 2 than type 1, perhaps in part due to the historical placement of libertarians on this side as well as an alliance with the business establishment and a (lessening) commitment to free markets. And presumably negative polarization from many of their political talking about exploitation all the time doesn’t help either. Recently, there’s been more talk on the right of exploitation, but, from my birds-eye view, this is largely about political elites and immigrants, not market forces (though perhaps opioids are a counterexample).
In either case, for much of the latter 20th century, market thinking has been on the right side of history — against the soviets, against restrictions based on race, and against restrictions based on gender. The idea that the market could be the order on which society was formed was not self-consciously malicious. Markets are powerful and important, and the idea that they might hold the key to a prosperous, peaceful, and free society was not unimaginable. But markets are a tool, and if all you have is a hammer, you’re going to end up stripping lots of screws of everything that makes them worthwhile.
If we seem to have drifted from our original question of whether ‘tis better to have seen the price and gawked than to have never been allowed in at all: that’s fair. We probably have. But in the next post in this series, we’ll look at what I see as the primary justification for what I am, following Michael Sandel somewhat, calling “market society” — a society in which everything is up for sale. I am hoping that the shorter-posts-in-a-series medium works better for both the feasibility of reading them and writing them than my historically, um, expansive posts. Eventually, we’ll tie it all in. Trust.
As expressed in Fleishman is in Trouble, “sophistication is either your first language or you always have an accent in it.”