What money can't buy

Bob, an american desi, thinks that we can quantify things like love, friendship, loyalty and a whole host of other things. Another american coined it : time is money!

That we can go from quantification to dollarization isn't that surprising (see Bernard Williams' comments on Bentham in 'Morality'). Once we start to conceptualize things in market terms, as commodities that are alienable and cease from thinking of them in relation to notions of personhood, or duties or rights then we're on a slippery slope to what Sandel calls 'corruption'. What matters here is the narrow conception of freedom: negative liberty and, ultimately, a shallow view of happiness (wealth and material goods).

What's really being commoditised here is Time itself (Marx:"Time is everything, Man is nothing" (see the excellent online article by Barbara Adam: "When time is money: contested rationalities or E.P's 'Time-Work discipline'). The Church saw this early on with its prohibition of usury (Le Goff: no-one "owns" time, and therefore it cannot be traded).

What Bob and his like are really saying is that other pursuits like poetry or art can be thought of as leisure and valued in terms of their opportunity cost (foregone income). Again: quantification implies commensurability. This obsession with reducing all behaviour (motivations and evaluations) to a single dimension for "tractability" at the theoretical level. It goes deeper than that, though: it's a political move. As Abe Lerner said, markets solve the political problem. Once we have the measure of life do we get the emergence of a new type of politics (the bio-political)? Once everything is reduced to life and the process of consumption do we lose the world as a place where human beings dwell, meet, tell stories to one another? The decline of public man, of trust, the view of nature as a resource (pure extension), are surely linked to these developments.

Americans -and we're all americans now-reared on the myth that the pursuit of happiness is a right suddenly realise that this obsession with happiness is part of the problem: I can, therefore I must (Zizek).


Well, what's wrong with that, bob asks? Who determines which things are alienable and which aren't, and to what degree? what's the process and what are the justifications for excluding us from thinking on those terms.


I don't think that's the right question..not to start off with anyway. I think we must recognize that throughout human history there's been the idea of the sacred and the profane, of different realms (or "spheres of justice") with their own set of principles to determine allocations of the 'goods' (rights, duties, equality, fairness, happiness, security, needs, merit, capabilities and so on). So, we must start the other way round: on what grounds should we say that one principle-the market- should dominate as a distributive mechanism?


But quite frankly, someone who thinks that friendship, happiness, art or love can be thought in terms of quantities already holds such an extreme view that I really don't know how to respond. Why this perverse need to calculate everything (Sen: evaluation is not calculation) ? Can we really order life, desires, time in that way?