What Money Can't Buy

The commodification of connection risks accelerating the inequality in our social lives while debasing the sacred good of human relationships. It's on us to define where markets do and don't belong.

“Connection is unstructured, unmeasured, and unmonetized. That gap is a market.

The Connection Economy is what’s forming to fill it. It’s not one type of business. It’s a whole category spanning industries that have never really talked to each other… When the institutions that used to deliver belonging for free start to fail, the market steps in … This is the business of human connection. What happens when belonging earns its place in the economy?” - from Belonging Capital

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I’m not starting with this quote to put the author on blast — I don’t know her, and I imagine she’s well-intended. I share it because it represents the crispest encapsulation I’ve seen of a dynamic that’s emerged over the last few years: The application of market logic to the historically non-market good of human connection.

Let’s briefly put on our Stanford business school hats to unpack this line of reasoning. The gap between demand for connection and the supply of that connection is the market opportunity. The total size of that market opportunity — the TAM, if you will — is the number of total customers multiplied by their willingness-to-pay for connection. This is how you end up with a “trillion dollar wellness economy … built on connection”: hundreds of millions of lonely people, willing to pay thousands of dollars a year to be less lonely. The market “steps in,” and belonging “earns its place in the economy.”

But this isn’t merely a continuation of premiumization trends that led to the proliferation of country clubs in the 1920s, gated communities in the 1980s, and expensive exercise classes in the 2010s; it’s a step function change in how we organize human relations. By explicitly commercializing some of the most essential ingredients to living a good life — by creating a “category” for belonging and a “market” for connection — we’re both institutionalizing and normalizing human connection as a market good.

So before we build “the business of human connection,” it’s worth asking the question: Should we?

Enter Michael Sandel, whose 2012 book, What Money Can’t Buy, is an invaluable source of wisdom for grappling with this question. His diagnosis is that, over the past several decades, the U.S. has transformed from a market economy to a market society. As he explains, “A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor … where social relations are made over in the image of the market” (p. 11). To Sandel, the application of market values to traditionally non-market goods can both (1) introduce the inequality of money and (2) corrupt those very goods.

This is the risk we face if we passively accept the commercialization and commodification of human connection. The unchecked proliferation of market logic into the social realm would accelerate the significant and growing inequality in our social lives, while simultaneously degrading the higher-order goods of human relationships and community. Not only would the distance between the social haves and have nots continue to increase, but some of the most human things we can do — be in relationship, participate in something bigger than ourselves — risk becoming corrupted beyond repair.

Here’s the thing: We’re not at all destined for the future envisioned by the Connection Economy boosters. My sense is it actually gives a lot of us the heebie-jeebies. So that just means it’s on us to imagine and work toward an alternative future — one where our market relationships serve the public good of our human relationships, and one where we collectively protect the sanctity of our relational lives from being remade in the debased image of the market.

Doubling down on social inequality

Markets run on money, and money often influences the goods in life that we can and cannot access. So when market logic is applied to the realm of human connection, it raises fundamental questions of distributive justice and fairness. Who should get access to relationships, community, and social support? Should this be conditioned upon one’s ability to pay?

These questions matter because human connection is essential to, well, human life. A growing expert consensus (if you’re into that kind of thing) has affirmed the importance of relationships to measurable positive outcomes in pretty much every field. There’s Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s research that found social isolation as a major predictor of premature mortality. There’s Raj Chetty’s research that identified cross-class connections as the greatest predictor of economic mobility in life. And there’s Theda Skocpol’s research on cross-class, federated civic groups serving as the foundation for participatory democracy in America. The list could go on for hundreds of pages. You get the point.

Market logic applied to human connection would dictate that those with the highest willingness and ability to pay should benefit from relationships and community. Remember, the market opportunity the Connection Economy boosters identify is simply this unmet consumer demand multiplied by their willingness-to-pay. But in the conditions of existing inequality, applying this market logic to human connection would only accelerate and compound that inequality. As Sandel explains in What Money Can’t Buy:

In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money can buy, the more affluence (or the lack of it) matters … Where all good things are bought and sold, having money makes all the difference in the world ... Not only has the gap between rich and poor widened, the commodification of everything has sharpened the sting of inequality by making money matter more. (pp. 8-9)

In some ways, this dynamic has already been unfolding in the shadows for the past half century. It’s been hidden behind the forces of geographic sorting, the decline of more accessible communities like church, unions, and civic groups, and their concomitant replacement with premium third places and community groups. As more and more of our social and community life becomes “pay-to-play,” those who don’t have the ability to pay increasingly can’t play. The inequality of our economic lives becomes replicated to our social lives, which reinforce each other, ad infinitum.

Left: SoHo House (Source: Mason Trinca for The New York Times) | Right: Equinox (Source: Jeenah Moon for The New York Times)

The much-discussed K-shaped economy is functionally a K-shaped society, organized by class and income. Today, a quarter of people without degrees have no close friends, compared to 10 percent of those with degrees. Americans without degrees are 3 to 4 times less likely to be members of community groups, 12 percent less likely to be members of religious groups, and approximately 15 percent less likely to be married between age 33 and 44. Meanwhile, men without degrees are twice as likely to die by suicide as men with degrees, and the life expectancy gap between Americans with and without degrees is now 8.5 years (and growing).

The boosters of the Connection Economy risk pushing our already historic levels of social inequality into hyperdrive. If they’re successful, they’ll build a whole new ecosystem of pay-to-play social infrastructure — from luxury real estate, to premium social clubs, to $200/hour “friendship coaches” — that may strengthen the already relatively strong relational lives of those who can pay. Meanwhile, for many lower-income Americans, the relational safety net has all but disappeared. Creating a “market for connection” would only make a connected life further out of reach for the very Americans most in need of relational support.

Degrading our relationships (and ourselves)

Applying market logic to human connection also raises moral questions. Should our relationships and communities be commodified? And what happens to these goods when we treat them as instruments of profit and use?

“Markets don’t only allocate goods; they also express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged,” Sandel writes in What Money Can’t Buy (pp. 9-10). “Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question.”

If philosophy and theology are any guide, human connection, friendship, and community should be valued as higher order goods — not commodities. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle sees friendship, particularly “virtue friendship,” as a vital and necessary good in the pursuit of the good life. In Confessions, St. Augustine describes “true friendship” as rooted in and inseparable from a relationship with God. In I and Thou, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber sees an “I-thou” relationship as a reciprocal, non-objectified encounter with another’s whole sacred being. And in “Turtles All The Way Down,” the contemporary musician-philosopher Sturgill Simpson writes, “But I swear that God is there / Every time I glare into the eyes of my best friend.”

Left: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics | Center: Martin Buber’s I and Thou | Right: Sturgill Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music

By applying market logic to the higher order good of human connection, we fundamentally corrupt and degrade it — that is, we “treat it according to a lower mode of valuation than is appropriate to it” (What Money Can’t Buy, p. 34).

Connection being “unstructured, unmeasured, and unmonetized” is the point; when we commodify connection and community, we debase these goods from the sacred to the profane. We reduce relationships from ends in and of themselves to transactional means toward some other end. We vanquish the uncategorizable spirit of relationship — its “thou-ness” as Buber would call it — and replace it with an “it-ness” that can be cleanly categorized, measured, and used. We cede the last place market logic hasn’t fully penetrated — our most cherished relationships and communities — to be “made over in the image of the market.”

“Marketizing a good can change its meaning,” Sandel explains (p. 81), and marketizing connection has the potential for society-wide implications. I’m not talking about little things like AT&T’s neighbor-washing commercial for The World Cup. I’m talking about that “trillion-dollar wellness economy … built on connection,” where the “self care” grift of the 2010s gets run back as the connection grift of the 2020s, and where every conceivable social interaction becomes seen as an opportunity to extract value. And I’m talking about a civic life fully remade in the image of the market, where we squeeze the very “life” out of it by treating it as a controllable, measurable machine rather than the unwieldy, mysterious living ecology it actually is.

This marketization of connection has implications for our personal lives, too. Because connection and community are inseparable from what makes us human, by commodifying them, we also commodify (and debase) ourselves in the process. We start to measure our social worth by the quantifiable number of friends we have, as many “social health” companies are trying to sell us. We start to see our own sense of belonging as a market good that can be bought for the right price, consumed, satisfied, and discarded.

We become connection consumers, gobbling up connection in a connection economy, satiated on our own connectedness, yet completely disconnected from the nonmarket goods of meaning and transcendence that make for a good life.

Defining where markets do belong

If much of the above sounds icky to you, here’s the good news: We’re not locked into a future of commodified connection. We can choose an alternative path — one that affirms human connection and community as goods that money can’t buy. The appropriate approach isn’t necessarily to shun market logic altogether. Rather, it’s to “decide, as a society, where markets serve the public good and where they don’t belong” (p. 14), as Sandel proposes.

Since we do live in a market economy, it behooves us to have a constructive vision for how the markets can serve the public good of human relationships. We need to ask: What role should the market play in our relational lives? This question, it turns out, leads us to a set of guiding principles — informed by centuries of thinking and practice from distributists, mutualists, and agrarians alike — that contrast sharply from the not-so-hidden values underpinning the Connection Economy.

We can start by defining what types of market interactions strengthen human relationships. Here, I’d make the case for active, participatory market relationships over passive, consumptive ones. Consider membership. When paid membership is designed as a pathway to participation, contribution, decision-making, and leadership — a YMCA practicing “deep membership” versus an exercise studio selling packages of classes — it deepens relationships among members and helps them see themselves as active agents rather than passive consumers. This is the mutualist vision of civic alignment, where membership, revenue, and governance all align, creating a virtuous cycle of democratic participants within organizations and across communities.

This directly connects to questions of where market relations are best situated and how power works within the market. Here, place matters, as the agrarians have long held, and more proximate, distributed market relationships are preferable to distant, concentrated ones. Consider ownership. When ownership of a community institution is embedded in the place it serves — a locally-owned coffee shop versus a Starbucks, for instance — owners develop a direct relationship with customers and the community, and they see their fate as intertwined with the community’s fate. When customers are also your neighbors, and your market is also your home, it creates an ethos of responsibility for, stewardship of, and accountability to your community’s well-being.

Left: The Floyd Country Store (Source: The Floyd Country Store) | Right: Dollar General (Source: Midwest vs. The Rest)

Or, consider the concept of scale. A distributist vision of scale sees it as millions of local businesses across tens of thousands of places, iteratively responding to the particular needs of their particular places and neighbors. An industrial vision of scale sees it as one centralized, top-down corporation entering hundreds of new markets to meet the untapped demand of millions of consumers. Distributist scale is responsive, particular to, and regenerative of human-scale relationships and communities, whereas industrial scale is often an impositional, abstracting, and extractive force. Compare a small-town general store to a Dollar General, and you’ll realize the difference is night and day. The former serves as a bedrock of community life, the latter strip mines it.

When market interactions are active, embedded, and distributed in this way, it changes our conceptions of who our constituencies are and the nature of our market relationships. Constituencies are no longer seen as an abstract national (or international) customer base defined by their willingness-to-pay. Instead, they become a particular set of members or neighbors defined by their willingness-to-participate. The nature of market interactions are no longer seen as contingent — that is, lasting only as long as the business and customer want to continue the transaction. Instead, they become defined by commitment: market relationships become communal relationships, and they are made durable by a shared commitment to place. Whereas the Connection Economy breeds sorting and using, this economy facilitates neighborly solidarity and reciprocity.

Protecting our relational lives from market logic

But in a society where market values are already so dominant, determining where markets don’t belong is harder than determining where they do. Building an economy that strengthens our relational lives is only part of the equation. We still have a thornier question to tackle: Where (and how) should our relational lives be protected from market logic?

This question carries significant spiritual and moral force, and implications both personal and communal. That’s because protecting our relational lives from market values is more than just a structural task; it must also involve recovering (or sustaining) a sense of the sacred. A great buffer against a belief system that sees the world as a finite set of material resources to be controlled, used, and consumed is one that sees it as an abundance of mysterious relationships to be stewarded.

This calls us to resist seeing ourselves as mere machine-like market actors, and rather see ourselves as living members of a morally ordered cosmos. When we see our fellow humans as being made in the image of God — or emerging from and part of some sacred life force we all share — it becomes much harder to treat individuals and communities as means to some other end. And when we see ourselves as inheritors of gifts — our natural, communal, and cultural ecosystems — we become much more likely to see ourselves as responsible for protecting, stewarding, and preserving those gifts.

Indeed, these communal gifts also require protection from market thinking. To do this, we must approach our families, communities, and institutions as sites of moral and spiritual formation. If we don’t, market values seep in, and they become sites of “great malformation.” In a pluralistic society, the what and how of this moral formation must vary by place and culture. But what matters is we create and sustain small “pockets of sanity” — in our families, our interpersonal relationships, our neighborhoods, our community groups, and our houses of worship — where the instrumental, transactional values of the market can’t penetrate. We cultivate and protect spaces where, to again quote Sandel, “money’s writ [does] not run.”

Wendell Berry has been writing about the stakes of unchecked market forces corrupting our relationships — human, communal, natural, and cosmic alike — for the better part of six decades. To him, this personal and communal protection is among our foremost responsibilities as members of the entire living universe, which he calls “Great Economy”:

For a human, the good choice in the Great Economy is to see its membership as a neighborhood and oneself as a neighbor within it … in the membership of the Great Economy everything signifies; whatever we do counts. If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys. We can presume that we are outside the membership that includes us, but that presumption only damages the membership — and ourselves, of course, along with it. (“Two Economies,” pp. 234-235 in The Art of The Commonplace)

Perhaps the only trait I can claim to have in common with Berry and Sandel is a reluctance to offer the quick fix or silver bullet solution. None of this is easy. Protecting our relational lives from market values sounds hard because it is. So, too, is building an economy that serves the public good of human relationships.

Fortunately, we have agency and we have time. We are not passive recipients of a market economy being imposed on us; we are active members of a Great Economy that we can steward and sustain. And we are not running out of time, for the time-scale of this membership has always been measured in generations, not quarters or fiscal years. So, we have a choice: Participate in a generational project of membership that coheres and endures, or succumb to a craze of consumption that disintegrates and destroys.

Let’s choose the former. Let’s choose to see connection being “unstructured, unmeasured, and unmonetized” not as a market gap, but as a manifestation of the mysterious messiness of human relationships. Let’s choose to resist a Connection Economy and instead commit to building an economy that deepens connection. Let’s choose to collectively stand our ground and say: relationships, friendship, and community are sacred goods that money can’t buy.

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