Can you put a price on everything?

 

Michael Sandel, a Harvard economist, writes a breezy book What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, which discusses the important question of the pricing of everything. Should your body parts be for sale? Are ticket scalpers providing a good service? Should we pay students to read books? Is it immoral to buy and sell death contracts? Is there something wrong with naming rights? 

An economist can say there is a price for everything, but does that mean we should make all activity transactional? Are there moral limits on what we can put a price on? What are the limits to a pricing scheme?

There are a lot of questions that are addressed in this book which makes it thought provoking for a wide audience. One the one hand, there is efficiency with pricing all activities. If I want to see a concert, I should be able to pay a premium for someone to stand in line for me. A sports owner should be able to sell naming rights to their stadium.  However, should I allow people to sell one of their kidneys? We have both volunteer and paid blood donors. 

Sandel presents interesting cases where placing a price on a good changes the demand for it. Similarly, he also presents cases where people do not respond to economic and price incentives. Consumers do not respect as expected to higher or lower prices. We also do not get the result that we want from changing incentives. Our behavior is often adjusted by the process of pricing.  The title discusses moral limits but there are cultural limits to how we look at the price of goods and service. Nevertheless, there is something very primal and efficient on trying to price everything.