56 pages • 1 hour read
Michael J. SandelWhat Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Naming Rights”
Our “market mania” age has had an immense impact on sport, such as baseball (201). Players’ salaries have increased immensely in the last 50 years, as have the costs of seats for spectators.
Chapter 5, Section 1 Summary: “Autographs for Sale”
In the 1980s, the autographed memorabilia of sports’ stars came to be viewed as marketable goods. This increased throughout the 1990s, particularly for memorabilia used in games, such as Mark McGwire’s record-setting 70th home-run ball, which was sold at auction in 1998 for $3 million.
A ball caught at a 2001 game by a fan, and pulled away by another fan, resulted in a lengthy legal battle.
The memorabilia market is now a billion-dollar industry. Even the dirt at stadiums where successful players stood and played is a sellable item: $10 million of Yankee Stadium dirt has been sold.
Chapter 5, Section 2 Summary: “Corporate-Sponsored Home Runs”
In many cases, stadiums have been renamed after sponsoring companies. This language even often applies to the wording commentators use, such as Arizona home runs being called a “Bank One blast” (209).
Chapter 5, Section 3 Summary: “Luxury Skyboxes”
Sandel points out that sporting arenas have morphed from a place of civic identity to a location of corporate earnings and sponsorship, changing the nature of the activity as market values often crowd-out intrinsic values.
Furthermore, the creation of luxury skyboxes separates the wealthy from the average fan. An opportunity for a classless, egalitarian experience has been lost in favor of a show of wealth and privilege.
Loyal fans of Michigan Stadium protested a $226 million renovation that included a luxury skybox, but it was nonetheless installed in 2010.
Chapter 5, Section 4 Summary: “Moneyball”
Billy Beane, manager of the Oakland Athletic A’s, used statistical analysis to win as many games as the New York Yankees, despite having one-third of the capital to buy players.
Some celebrate this new mode of thinking, suggesting that these changes have created an environment in business, finance, environmental protection, and sport that supports ingenuity, intelligence, and mathematical reasoning.
After Beane publicized his strategy, players who were patient at the plate and who tended to take walks rather than steal bases (Beane’s focus) became more highly valued, and Beane’s underdog strategy was no longer effective. Furthermore, the strategies popularized by Beane (less base-stealing, more patiently waiting for walks) made the game less interesting for spectators.
Chapter 5, Section 5 Summary: “Bathroom Advertising”
Ads have crept into every avenue of everyday life, including Pizza Hut advertising on a Russian rocket sent into space, etched onto individual eggs, and on tiny screens in gas stations, ATMs, and on urinals.
Chapter 5, Section 6 Summary: “Ads in Books”
British author Fay Weldon was commissioned to write a book by Bulgari; he mentioned the word “Bulgari” 34 times in return for a substantial (undisclosed) commission. People can turn their house and car into advertising space, in return for payments from advertisers.
Chapter 5, Section 7 Summary: “Body Billboards”
Some restaurants have offered free meals for people willing to get temporary, or even permanent, tattoos.
A woman named Kari Smith auctioned off her forehead, needing money for her son’s education. She now has a casino’s website address on her face.
Chapter 5, Section 8 Summary: “Branding the Public Square”
Many feel anxiety and alarm about the proliferation of advertising in public spaces. There is the argument that people who are paid to have their bodies, houses, or cars covered in advertising are coerced into doing so through financial hardship. The other argument is that there is a degradation or corruption of public spaces and bodies.
Chapter 5, Section 9 Summary: “Branded Lifeguards and Nature Trails”
The sand at the beach of Seaside Heights, New Jersey, was stamped with Skippy Peanut Butter Jars imprints. General Motors sponsored lifeguards in Orange County, and Ford sponsored lifeguards in Los Angeles. Coca-Cola became the official drink of Huntington Beach, California.
Subway stations and carriages have sold advertising rights for millions of dollars. Increasingly, state parks are seeking funding through selling advertising to corporate sponsors. For example, North Face logos appear on trail heads of national park walks.
Chapter 5, Section 10 Summary: “Police Cars and Fire”
Many police municipalities in North Carolina considered accepting advertising on police cruisers in return for upgraded cars. This attracted controversy; many believed that this could lead to favoritism of sponsored brands from an institution that should be unbiased. Others felt that it demeaned the police force.
Advertising is present on some police cars in Massachusetts, as well as on fire extinguishers in Minneapolis.
Chapter 5, Section 11 Summary: “Jails and Schools”
In Buffalo, New York, convicted defendants see ads for bail bondsmen and defense lawyers immediately after their arrest on a high-definition television. There are also screens with advertising for individuals visiting inmates.
Channel One launched a news program containing two minutes of paid advertising, designed at an audience of children and teenagers in schools. In other cases, corporate logos appear around school buildings and classrooms and in yearbooks. Sponsored learning programs are provided for free for teachers through companies, but they often have an agenda, such as the Scholastic-run and American Coal Foundation-funded “United States of Energy Program,” which underplayed the environmental drawbacks of coal extraction.
In other cases, companies have paid for naming rights within schools, reflecting the modern conception of children’s buying power.
Chapter 5, Section 12 Summary: “The Skyboxification of Everyday Life”
Sandel continues to suggest that markets leave their mark, and that items, like books, are corrupted and demeaned by advertising. Tattooing bodies with corporate sponsors due to financial struggle is inherently demeaning. Furthermore, the increasingly commodified nature of access to sporting events, medical treatment, and schools means that those from different income brackets will come into less and less contact. People need to collectively decide whether they want a society where everything is a commodity, or whether there are certain moral and civic areas that money should not be able to buy.
Chapter 5 Analysis
Sandel continues to suggest that over-commodification has two primary disadvantages: unfairness (Free-Market Values and Social Inequality), and degradation of institutions or society (The Immorality of Over-Commodification).
Through expounding on these shortcomings and continuing to suggest that market values have infiltrated into a myriad of traditionally nonmarket spaces, Sandel hopes to emphasize The Importance of Debate on Market Values. Sandel suggests that these debates are confounded by the fact that the current political sphere is fractious and unproductive: “[T]he era of market triumphalism has coincided with a time when public discourse has been largely empty of moral and spiritual substance” (250). Individuals in society need to challenge the absence of moral substance in public debate, Sandel suggests, in order to resist the increasing commodification that is threatening every institution and space we hold dear: “[O]ur only hope of keeping markets in their place is to deliberate openly and publicly about the meaning of the goods and social practices we prize” (250, emphasis added).
In terms of degradation created by commodification, Sandel criticizes the purchasing of baseball commentator language by advertisers, such as when broadcasters are obligated to call an Arizona home run a “Bank One blast” (209). Sandel suggests that the “boundlessness” of 21st-century commercialism is symbolically significant, as it is “emblematic of a world in which everything is for sale” (228, emphasis added). Similarly, the status of sporting stadiums, schools, police cars and stations, and jails—civic spaces that were traditionally unbiased and considered important in for civic values—are degraded when they are covered with corporate branding and filled with print and television advertisements.
Furthermore, Sandel mourns the evolution of signed sporting memorabilia from a kind gesture of a sporting icon to a fan into a billion-dollar industry. He bemoans the cynicism of the autographing business: “[T]hese days the chase also includes collectors, dealers and investors” (203). The fans of the past are characterized as genuine and authentic, whereas the modern investors are characterized as greedy, motivated by financial gain rather than by the love of the sport. Sandel continues to suggest that “markets change norms of the objects they affect” (205) through the story of the legal wrangling over the ball caught by a fan at a baseball match. What would have once been a moment of joy and a celebration of the sport became “a court trial involving six lawyers and a panel of court-appointed law professors” arguing over “what constitutes possession of a baseball” (205). Further emphasizing the increasing cynicism that market values introduce to all aspects of life, the two people involved in the legal battle agreed to sell the ball and split the profits.
In terms of Free-Market Values and Social Inequality, Sandel mourns the introduction of expensive corporate boxes into sporting arenas, as this removes the egalitarian nature that used to epitomize watching sport: “[F]or most of the twentieth century, ballparks were places where corporate executives sat side by side with blue-collar workers, where everyone waited in the same lines to buy hot dogs or beer, and where rich and poor alike got wet if it rained” (212). Increasingly, the mega-rich enjoy the game from private luxury boxes. Sandel suggests that this erodes the camaraderie between fans and further deepens class divisions in a space that should erode them. Sandel suggests that the segregation of sporting fans is emblematic of a larger process of wealth-based separation that market values are creating, further establishing a pattern of “rising inequality” (150). Due to the infiltration of market values, “people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools” (250).
Sandel continues to question the free-market assumption that commodification can be freely opted into and out of, and that this is at an individual’s discretion. He counters by emphasizing the role that financial strife and poverty play in coercing individuals: “If a homeowner facing imminent foreclosure agrees to have a garish ad painted on her house, her choice may not really be free but effectively coerced” (229). Similarly, “if a parent, in desperate need of money to buy medicine for his child, agrees to be tattooed to advertise a product, his choice may not be all that voluntary” (229). Sandel argues that market relations are not truly free, as some groups will be under more or different pressures, namely through “dire economic necessity” (229) that can affect or limit their options for survival.
Thus, in calling for recognition of The Importance of Debate on Market Values, Sandel hopes to reintroduce an ethical dimension into how we think about the role of markets in society, and how market values can threaten or erode other values and ideals that society formerly used to cherish.
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