How putting a price on something can change everything
The influential book Moneyball was published ten years ago. It told the story of how the Oakland A’s studied baseball player statistics to determine which skills actually led to scoring runs. What they found was surprising: the A’s discovery completely changed the labor market for players. It changed the nature of the game itself, how it’s played.
This is just one example of how markets are affecting not just baseball but nearly every sphere of American life. Michel Sandel is the author of What Money Can’t Buy, The Moral Limits of Markets. He uses baseball to illustrate several key points.
So, we invited him to Fenway Park to see them in action.
Sandel is a proud member of Red Sox Nation, even though he grew up rooting for the Minnesota Twins — back when games were much shorter.
“Today, it’s common for games to go over three hours, sometimes three-and-a-half, four hours, and ‘Moneyball’ is actually partly to blame,” Sandel says.
When teams analyzed player statistics, they found that it wasn’t the exciting parts of the game like hitting homeruns and stealing bases that contributed most to winning. It was walks. So teams started hiring players who were good at drawing walks.
“That makes for a rather dull, long game, if everyone is trying to get a walk” Sandel points out.
He says this is an example of how putting a price on something can change its value. In the case of “Moneyball,” it changed how teams valued players and it changed the game itself. And this isn’t just happening with baseball. We pay kids for good grades, we’ve created a market for pollution in the form of carbon offsets. There is even a market for human blood.
“These may seem like small, relatively self-contained examples of markets running rampant,” Sandel says. “But we see it in bigger institutions as well. In Iraq and Afghanistan there were more private contractors then there were U.S. military troops.”
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This was not the result of a public debate about whether or not we should outsource war to private companies.
“But this is what has happened,” Sandel says. “And I’m suggesting we step back and have a broader debate about what should be the role of money and markets in our society. Where do markets and market mechanisms serve the public good and where do they not belong?”
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