En el 2009 Michael Sandel ofreció una serie de conferencias (Reith Lectures), tituladas 'A New citizenship'. En éstas abordaba, entre otras cosas, la necesidad imperiosa de cuestionar el triunfalismo del racionamiento de mercado en cada una de las facetas de nuestra vida. Todo lo vemos y lo analizamos, aún sin percatarnos, con la racionalidad de la eficiencia, de si las decisiones son o no costo-beneficiosas, de si conviene o no en términos de optimizar 'los recursos'. Esto, como bien apunta Sandel, no solo lo hace 'el mercado' en las dinámicas de consumo, sino que en nuestra cotidianidad, hemos adoptado sin más esta forma de dirimir nuestras controversias. El debate público, el poco que hay, apunta en esta dirección, en todos los problemas que confrontamos. ¿Y qué tiene de malo este análisis? ¿Por qué no debe ser así? Es eso precisamente lo que aborda Sandel, uno de los filósofos políticos contemporáneos más seguidos. Esa lógica que impregna ya no solo la economía de mercado sino a la sociedad misma en prácticamente todos los ámbitos de nuestra vida, no es la mejor en todas las circunstancias y, lo peor, nos priva de cualquier aspiración a discutir y deliberar democráticamente sobre la valoración que le damos o deberíamos darle a los diferentes asuntos en la sociedad que vivimos.
El proyecto universitario y las discusiones sobre éste, aún desde adentro de los sectores que componemos la comunidad universitaria, no ha estado exento de este embate. Así, ha sido poco o ninguno el cuestionamiento sobre la implantación de los criterios de mercado aplicados a muchos ámbitos y programas académicos, las políticas educativas, la toma de decisiones respecto a la ubicación de los pocos recursos con que contamos. La crisis que enfrentamos no es solo presupuestaria y en todo caso este ámbito de la crisis (el presupuestario) no lo resolveremos desde la lógica de los economistas ni aplicando las fórmulas de la contabilidad. Tendríamos que, como apunta Sandel, comenzar y avanzar hacia una discusión sensata sobre la valoración del proyecto universitario, una valoración más allá del utilitarismo rampante que nos atraviesa.
Habría que estar más atentos y atentas para identificar cómo es que hemos normalizado sin cuestionamiento esta forma de racionalizar los eventos y los asuntos que acontecen en nuestra cotidianeidad. Cómo formamos opiniones, proponemos y debatimos bastante homogéneamente, dentro de este marco. Es este asunto el que atiende Michael Sandel en su serie de conferencias. Algunas las he colgado ya en blog pero creo que sus planteos hay que internalizarlos más y tomarlos más en serio para llevarlos a la práctica. Resumo muy arbitrariamente la segunda de sus conferencias titulada 'Markets and Morals' (9 de junio de 2009, disponible en la página de la BBC) en la que explica el problema que nos presenta "the age of market triumphalism".
[…]
A new politics of the common good isn’t only about finding more scrupulous politicians. It also requires a more demanding idea of what it means to be a citizen, and it requires a more robust public discourse - one that engages more directly with moral and even spiritual questions. And so in the course of these lectures, I’ll explore the prospect of a new citizenship and I’ll be asking what a more morally engaged public life might be like.
A new politics of the common good isn’t only about finding more scrupulous politicians. It also requires a more demanding idea of what it means to be a citizen, and it requires a more robust public discourse - one that engages more directly with moral and even spiritual questions. And so in the course of these lectures, I’ll explore the prospect of a new citizenship and I’ll be asking what a more morally engaged public life might be like.
If we’re to reinvigorate public discourse, if we’re to focus on big questions that matter, questions of moral significance, one of the first subjects we need to address is the role of markets, and in particular the moral limits of markets. Which brings me to the topic of this first lecture. We’re living with the economic fallout of the financial crisis and we’re struggling to make sense of it. One way of understanding what’s happened is to see that we’re at the end of an era, an era of market triumphalism. The last three decades were a heady, reckless time of market mania and deregulation. We had the free market fundamentalism of the Reagan-Thatcher years and then we had the market friendly Neo-Liberalism of the Clinton and Blair years, which moderated but also consolidated the faith that markets are the primary mechanism for achieving the public good. Today that faith is in doubt. Market triumphalism has given way to a new market scepticism. Almost everybody agrees that we need to improve regulation, but this moment is about more than devising new regulations. It’s also a time, or so it seems to me, to rethink the role of markets in achieving the public good.
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[Ejemplo 1 (Sandel ofrece varios ejemplos del contexto estadounidense)]:
Or consider the vexed issue of immigration policy. Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize winning free market economist at the University of Chicago, has a solution: to resolve the contentious debate over whom to admit, the US, he says, should simply set a price and sell American citizenship for 50,000 dollars, or perhaps 100,000. Immigrants willing to pay a large entrance fee, Becker reasons, would automatically have desirable characteristics. (LAUGHTER) They are likely to be young, skilled, ambitious, hardworking; and, better still, unlikely to make use of welfare or unemployment benefits. (LAUGHTER) Becker also suggests that charging admission would make it easier to decide which refugees to accept - namely those sufficiently motivated to pay the price. Now you might say that asking a refugee fleeing persecution to hand over 50,000 dollars is callous. So consider another market proposal to solve the refugee problem, one that doesn’t make the refugees themselves pay out of their own pockets. An American law professor proposed the following: that an international body assign each country a yearly refugee quota based on national wealth. Then let nations buy and sell these obligations among themselves. So, for example, if Japan is allocated 20,000 refugees per year but doesn’t want to take them, it could pay Poland or Uganda to take them in. According to standard market logic, everyone benefits: Poland or Uganda gains a new source of national income; Japan meets its refugee obligations by outsourcing them; and more refugees are rescued than would otherwise find asylum. What could be better?
There is something distasteful about a market in refugees, even if it’s for their own good, but what exactly is objectionable about it? It has something to do with the fact that a market in refugees changes our view of who refugees are and how they should be treated. It encourages the participants - the buyers, the sellers and also those whose asylum is being haggled over - to think of refugees as burdens to be unloaded or as revenue sources rather than as human beings in peril. What this worry shows is that markets are not mere mechanisms. They embody certain norms. They presuppose, and also promote, certain ways of valuing the goods being exchanged. Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not touch or taint the goods they regulate. But this is a mistake. Markets leave their mark. Often market incentives erode or crowd out non-market incentives.
[Ejemplo 2:]
Let’s go back to the case of cash for kids who make good test scores. Why hesitate to pay a child for getting good marks or for reading a book? The goal, after all, is to motivate the child to study or to read, and the payment is an incentive to promote that end. Economics teaches that people respond to incentives, and while some children may be motivated to read books for the love of learning, others may not. So why not use money to add a further incentive? Economic reasoning would suggest that two incentives work better than one, but it could turn out that the monetary incentive undermines the intrinsic one, leading to less reading rather than more, or to more reading in the short-run but for the wrong reason. On this scenario, the market is an instrument but not an innocent instrument. What begins as a market mechanism becomes a market norm. The obvious worry is that the payment may habituate children to think of reading books as a way of making money, and so erode or crowd out or corrupt the intrinsic good of reading.
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My general point is this. Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities, so to decide when to use markets, it’s not enough to think about efficiency; we have also to decide how to value the goods in question. Health, education, national defense, criminal justice, environmental protection and so on - these are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. To decide them democratically, we have to debate case by case the moral meaning of these goods in the proper way of valuing. This is the debate we didn’t have during the age of market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realising it, without ever deciding to do so, we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. The hope for moral and civic renewal depends on having that debate now. It is not a debate that is likely to produce quick or easy agreement. To argue about the right way of valuing goods is to bring moral and even spiritual questions into public discourse. Is it possible to bring moral and religious disagreements into public life without descending into intolerance and coercion? That is the question I’ll turn to in the next lecture. Thank you very much.
