Is Everything For Sale?

Tom Sgouros

25 March 2001

Published in an Indiana University newsletter (don't ask)

We buy. It's a way of life. Our ancestors hunted, fished, and farmed to make a living. We buy.

What's great about this is that everything is for sale: food, clothing, cool sneakers, land, houses. You can get anything you want if you have the money for it.

What's not so great about this is that everything is for sale: food, clothing, cool sneakers, land, houses. You can get anything you want only if you have the money for it.

What's really impressive is the variety of things one can buy, ranging from the edible to the abstract. Of course, we've been able to buy and sell ideas since the first musician played for his supper, but the abstractions have moved into a different realm since the dawn of the Age of Capital.

You can buy wheat. You can also buy futures on wheat: a bet on the price of wheat next month or next year. And you can buy futures on futures on wheat, too. You can also buy futures on things that you can't buy or sell themselves: you can buy futures on stock averages, for example.

Some ideas you can buy are about buying. Clarence Saunders patented the concept of the supermarket in 1917 (US Pat #1,242,872), and that seemed to set off some kind of trigger. Franchises are, after all, just permission to run a restaurant with a particular name and style. The potato-fryer might be proprietary, but the name is the big deal.

We buy and sell experience. Ask anyone who's been to Disneyworld what they got for their tickets. It's an experience, pre-tested to please, and with no uncertainty about it: the experience of pleasure.

We're even exploring the possiblity of buying and selling the rights to pollute clean air, or to cut down swaths of rainforest.

We don't buy and sell people -- at least not legally -- but there is a thriving trade in people-parts. (Not to mention the adoption marketplace.) There seems, for example, no real way to forestall the development of a real market in transplant organs. And John Moore, who was treated for leukemia in 1984, was later surprised to discover that cultures of his cells were used to develop profitable anti-cancer treatments, and that a US patent claim was even pending on them. The California Supreme Court ruled in 1990 that he had no right to control (or share in profits from) his own body-parts. (The decision was upheld by the US Court of Appeals in 1991.)

By now, patents on genes are a commonplace. Half the fun of the Human Genome Project has apparently been figuring out which genes will yield patents that can be profitably sold to drug companies, and identifying them in detail before that darned public consortium ruins claims to priority. The breathless race to the finish last summer wasn't just about scientific glory; it was about money.

Is all this good? At this point, it's hard to guess. If we can figure out a way to protect rain forests with the happy cooperation of giant corporations, then that's good. But how likely is it? Markets for the rights to some part of the rain forest will spawn markets for the expertise of the people who certify that this or that part of the forest is still OK. Who will those people be? Who will be investors in those consulting companies? Who will have market power?

We do have a market for something like this in many states, where land developers can buy and sell some land's "wetness." That is, if I own a swamp, I can fill it and build the mall of my dreams there as long as I promise to build another swamp somewhere else. It's hard to imagine a commodity more abstract than "swampiness" but corporations today trade the rights to this or that piece of swamp with happy abandon, and the trade was a direct outgrowth of establishing a market for wetland "mitigation."

A market for pollution credits, where companies buy and sell the rights to a certain amount of pollution to spew, is bound to spark the establishment of a market for pollution credit futures, where corporations make bets on how valuable pollution credits will be next year. But this is dependent on how clean our air will be then, and how compliant the Congress, and corporations are hardly innocent bystanders to those developments. Would you buy wheat futures from a rain god?

The history of economics is the history of people trying to analyze the behavior of markets. The one consistent lesson is that it's easier to analyze what did happen than to predict what will happen. That is, the history of economics is also the history of people making predictions and getting it wrong.

Ok, ok, so maybe having a market for everything is part good and part bad, like almost everything else. But is it inevitable? Does it have to be this way?

It's only inevitable when our society is suffused with the notion that the market is the answer to all ills. This is the 21st century's dominant religion, but we can choose atheism.

In the 21st century, contentment with your possessions is a radical act. Don't buy, make. Don't buy, borrow. Don't buy, fix. Don't buy... enjoy what you have.