Debra Satz on Markets

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2011

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

Debra Satz, Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about her book, Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale: The Moral Limits of the Market. Satz argues that some markets are noxious and should not be allowed to operate freely. Topics discussed include organ sales, price spikes after natural disasters, the economic concept of efficiency and utilitarianism. The conversation includes a discussion of the possible limits of political intervention and whether it would be good to allow voters to sell their votes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. Today is July 25th, 2011, and my guest is Deborah Sats, the Marta Sutton
0:43.6	Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society and the Department of Philosophy at Stanford University.
0:47.9	She is the author of, why something should not be for sale the moral limits of the market
0:53.3	Deborah Welcome to Econ Talk. Thank you for having me. Your book on the moral limits of markets
0:58.6	is very provocative in the best sense of the word for this economist. You start the book by criticizing
1:04.4	the sterility of how markets are viewed by modern economists, relative to classical economists,
1:10.4	Smith, Ricardo, and Marx. What do you think is wrong with how modern economists look at markets?
1:15.2	So I have a number of places where I think that the modern view has lost some of the insights
1:26.2	of the earlier view. And the first thing is that modern economists tend to treat, this isn't
1:32.8	completely true, but tend to treat all markets as the same. So they're more interested in the
1:38.6	quantitative properties of markets, the equations that you can use to write down the supply and
1:45.8	demand curves, and less interested in the qualitative dimensions of markets. And I think that's a
1:53.4	mistake because I think in the abstract, you're losing some information that you need about
2:00.3	particular markets. And so I, in my book, explore the qualitative dimensions of markets that
2:08.0	people respond to intuitively. So intuitively, people have very different reactions to markets in
2:15.8	body parts than they do to markets in automobiles. Even though all of these things can be represented
2:22.2	by the same set of equations, there's an intuitive disgust or a porous to certain kinds of market
2:33.2	transactions. And what I'm interested in is seeing what in the concrete, in particular heterogeneous
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