[Vision2020] This Column Is Not Sponsored by Anyone

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May 12, 2012
This Column Is Not Sponsored by Anyone By THOMAS L.
FRIEDMAN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

PORING through Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel’s new book, “What Money
Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” I found myself over and over again
turning pages and saying, “I had no idea.”

I had no idea that in the year 2000, as Sandel notes, “a Russian rocket
emblazoned with a giant Pizza Hut logo carried advertising into outer
space,” or that in 2001, the British novelist Fay Weldon wrote a book
commissioned by the jewelry company Bulgari and that, in exchange for
payment, “the author agreed to mention Bulgari jewelry in the novel at
least a dozen times.” I knew that stadiums are now named for corporations,
but had no idea that now “even sliding into home is a corporate-sponsored
event,” writes Sandel. “New York Life Insurance Company has a deal with 10
Major League Baseball teams that triggers a promotional plug every time a
player slides safely into base. When the umpire calls the runner safe at
home plate, a corporate logo appears on the television screen, and the
play-by-play announcer must say, ‘Safe at home. Safe and secure. New York
Life.’ ”

And while I knew that retired baseball players sell their autographs for
$15 a pop, I had no idea that Pete Rose, who was banished from baseball for
life for betting, has a Web site that, Sandel writes, “sells memorabilia
related to his banishment. For $299, plus shipping and handling, you can
buy a baseball autographed by Rose and inscribed with an apology: ‘I’m
sorry I bet on baseball.’ For $500, Rose will send you an autographed copy
of the document banishing him from the game.”

I had no idea that in 2001 an elementary school in New Jersey became
America’s first public school “to sell naming rights to a corporate
sponsor,” Sandel writes. “In exchange for a $100,000 donation from a local
supermarket, it renamed its gym ‘ShopRite of Brooklawn Center.’ ... A high
school in Newburyport, Mass., offered naming rights to the principal’s
office for $10,000. ... By 2011, seven states had approved advertising on
the sides of school buses.”

Seen in isolation, these commercial encroachments seem innocuous enough.
But Sandel sees them as signs of a bad trend: “Over the last three
decades,” he states, “we have drifted from having a market economy to
becoming a market society. A market economy is a tool — a valuable and
effective tool — for organizing productive activity. But a ‘market society’
is a place where everything is up for sale. It is a way of life where
market values govern every sphere of life.”

Why worry about this trend? Because, Sandel argues, market values are
crowding out civic practices. When public schools are plastered with
commercial advertising, they teach students to be consumers rather than
citizens. When we outsource war to private military contractors, and when
we have separate, shorter lines for airport security for those who can
afford them, the result is that the affluent and those of modest means live
increasingly separate lives, and the class-mixing institutions and public
spaces that forge a sense of common experience and shared citizenship get
eroded.

This reach of markets into every aspect of life was partly a result of the
end of the cold war, he argues, when America’s victory was interpreted as a
victory for unfettered markets, thus propelling the notion that markets are
the primary instruments for achieving the public good. It was also the
result of Americans wanting more public services than they were willing to
pay taxes for, thus inviting corporations to fill in the gap with school
gyms brought to you by ShopRite.

Sandel is now a renowned professor at Harvard, but we first became friends
when we grew up together in Minneapolis in the 1960s. Both our fathers took
us to the 1965 World Series, when the Dodgers beat the Twins in seven
games. In 1965, the best tickets in Metropolitan Stadium cost $3; bleachers
were $1.50. Sandel’s third-deck seat to the World Series cost $8. Today,
alas, not only are most stadiums named for companies, but the wealthy now
sit in skyboxes — even at college games — that cost tens of thousands of
dollars a season, and hoi polloi sit out in the rain.

Throughout our society, we are losing the places and institutions that used
to bring people together from different walks of life. Sandel calls this
the “skyboxification of American life,” and it is troubling. Unless the
rich and poor encounter one another in everyday life, it is hard to think
of ourselves as engaged in a common project. At a time when to fix our
society we need to do big, hard things together, the marketization of
public life becomes one more thing pulling us apart. “The great missing
debate in contemporary politics,” Sandel writes, “is about the role and
reach of markets.” We should be asking where markets serve the public good,
and where they don’t belong, he argues. And we should be asking how to
rebuild class-mixing institutions.

“Democracy does not require perfect equality,” he concludes, “but it does
require that citizens share in a common life. ... For this is how we learn
to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the
common good.”


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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