What's (legitimately) for sale and what's priceless? It's a question that cuts to the core of our era. Some years back Mastercard ran a very successful series of ads (they are still playing!) on this very dilemma.
It’s a devilishly clever advertisement: on the surface it seems to say that some things in life are priceless and it plays on our sympathy for those priceless items and feelings. But its actual message is: you can buy almost everything. And credit is a particularly insidious form of pricing, since it pushes our liabilities into the future. Not my problem - not now anyway!
After all, what is climate change if not credit debt gone rogue: if carbon emissions led to warming and ocean rise in ten weeks instead of a hundred years, we would have never released carbon dioxide in such large amounts. But we have poor mental models for debt, which sucks ever more people into its hold.
If only we could live in the future, not just speculate about it.
The commoditization of time is one of the key strengths (weaknesses?) of capitalism. It helps us trade debt tomorrow for goods today, salaries tomorrow for labour today and so on. Our system would stop existing if we couldn’t measure time in several overlapping ways: as seconds on a clock, as rupees per hour and carbon per year.
Is time priced or priceless?
All the evidence presented above points to time being meticulously measured and priced, but that isn’t the whole story is it? Your life as a whole is priceless right? And once it runs out, it runs out. There’s no shortage of deathbed confessions about how they wished they had spent more time with their loved ones instead of slaving away for a salary, but once again: what incentives make us choose the fat cheque over the laughter of our children?
As goes Time, so goes the Planet
Once you start counting, everything on Earth has a price. Every tree, every flower and every fish has a number written in invisible ink on it. But what about the planet as a whole: do you think it should be priced?
Not at all, right?
When people say ‘there’s no Planet B’ they mean the Earth is priceless. Once it’s gone it’s gone and except for ten billionaires who will duke it out on Mars, the rest of us will rue the day we pushed our planetary debt beyond redemption.
Let’s not get sanctimonious, for there’s no escaping this accounting, even if you’re the most committed environmentalist. We are writing the Messenger while sitting at a wooden table. Some tree somewhere paid the price for these words.
Which poses a deep philosophical problem: how can a priceless whole be composed out of priced parts?
Every drop of water, every ton of carbon, every kilo of rice has a price and yet, they add up to a planet that’s priceless. We have evolved two separate systems for the priced and the priceless. The economic system takes care of pricing. Meanwhile, the legal-justice system takes care of the priceless. When we say human rights or animal rights, we mean: these entities in these contexts should not be priced.
And that’s not the end of the conundrum, for both the pricing and the pricelessness seem to derive from the same feature of existence: its finiteness. As long as we thought the Earth is (effectively) infinite, we didn’t care about how many forests we cut down. It’s because time is finite and measurable that we can trade money for ten minute delivery. It’s because time is finite and irreplaceable that we are asked to cherish our living moments while we have them.
Some units of time/planet are replaceable: this tree for that tree, this programmer for that programmer. But then the same units are also irreplaceable: this tree and its shelter can’t be replaced once it’s gone (imagine the mini-ecosystem of insects and animals that depend on this unique tree’s existence) and this programmer is a unique human whose dreams can’t be crushed for mine. How is that possible? How can one and the same thing be a commodity and a unique being at once?
Moral of the story: scarcity is the source of economic value which can be traded and stored AND the source of unique value that can’t be traded or stored.
We will leave you with a question:
How do we reconcile the two forms of scarcity so we know what to price and what to leave priceless? In other words: how to resolve the contradiction between the economic and the justice systems?