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Markets Make Lousy Gods
June 27, 2007
In a capitalist economy, work isn't "valued" -- i.e., paid -- according to how useful, difficult, dangerous, dirty, or important it is. How useful, difficult, dangerous, dirty, and/or important was the "work" done by Ken Lay at Enron, or Dick Cheney at Halliburton, or any of those other high-flying corporate guys? Socialist economies may have different criteria, but they aren't exactly fair, impartial, or even rational either. Long ago I was so impressed when I learned that two-thirds of the doctors in the USSR were women. In the USA at that time "doctor" was a well-paid and prestigious position, and women doctors were few and far between. I jumped to the conclusion that in the Soviet Union women held lots of well-paid and prestigious positions. Wrong. "Doctor" in the USSR was not a well-paid or prestigious position. The well-paid and prestigious positions were mostly held by men.
Let's not get obsessed with the relative worth of plumbers and caregivers, or teachers and sports stars, or doctors and nurses. The more important point is that although in some respects the market does a good job of allocating resources, there are certain things that the unregulated market doesn't do well at all, like consider the future. It can be adjusted to take the future into account; for instance, the cost of eventual disposal can be factored in to the cost of production, or consumers can be charged to get rid of their nonrecyclable, noncompostable trash.
The unregulated market is amoral. It doesn't give a damn about social justice or democracy. In the unregulated market, everything has its price, depending on how many people want it and how much they're willing to pay for it. The market doesn't make a distinction between, say, political offices and cars. Why should it? That's not its job. Abdicating political and ethical choices to the market is pretty much like turning it all over to a god whose guiding principle is "Whatever."
But no market is entirely unregulated. Markets do reflect values of the political as well as the monetary kind. And social structures are shaped by markets. The geographical distribution of the U.S. population was shaped by cheap gas and cheap electricity. The wages of a whole array of occupations are skewed by an abundance of cheap labor. For occupations that involve caregiving, that cheap (or free) labor has generally been female. When women's paid-job options were pretty much limited to teacher, nurse, and secretary, the pool for these jobs was large, the skill level high, and the salaries didn't come close to reflecting the value of those jobs to either employers or society at large. Give women more options, and we're less willing and able to work for peanuts. If society wants those jobs done, and done well, it can't leave everything up to the market.
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