A shared civic life

All this week the Marketplace show on NPR has been doing a series on Consumed. They've been looking at various aspects of the question: What are the long-term consequences and costs of an economy so focused on consumerism? Two members of the team flew to Boston (showing what the first class perks will get you) to talk to Harvard professor, Michael Sandal. He wrote the book What Money Can't Buy, The Moral Limits of Markets. A major point of the discussion is that market mentality has become pervasive in every aspect of life, and in lots of places that is quite inappropriate. As part of the visit the three of them took in a baseball game and snuck into one of the skyboxes. The report ends with this:

“It’s no longer the case that everyone still stands in the same long lines for the restroom, or eats the same pretty inadequate food, and it's no longer true that when it rains, everyone gets wet,” [Sandal] says.

This wouldn’t really matter if we were talking about just baseball games and airports. But when you add up all these examples, not to mention access to better health care and education, Sandel says it creates a problem for us.

“Democracy doesn’t require perfect equality, but it does require that men and women from different backgrounds, different walks of life, encounter one another, bump up against one another in the course of ordinary life. Because this is what gives us a sense that we are all in this together -- that sense of being engaged in a common project. Without that experience of a shared civic life, it’s very difficult to think and act as democratic citizens.”

My summary: The rich are no longer in community with the rest of us.