In his new book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Harvard Professor Michael Sandel tells us a story about Michael Rice, a 48-year-old employee of Walmart, who in 1999 collapsed while helping a customer carry a television to her car. Rice died a week later, and an insurance company paid out $300,000 for the loss of his life. The twist was in who benefited from the insurance. It wasn’t Rice’s family, who didn’t get a cent, but Walmart. Neither Rice nor his family had known of this insurance policy taken out by Walmart, and his family was deeply offended by the policy and benefit. Rice’s family sued, and the lawsuit revealed that Walmart had hundreds of thousands of such policies; as do thousands of other companies, so that every time an employee died, the company collected a windfall. And that’s “dead peasants insurance”, or, as it is also known, “janitors insurance” – a type of investment on how long employees will live.

Another example of this process was the development of “viaticals”. These were insurance policies that had been taken out earlier in their lives by people who were dying of AIDS. The life insurance policies of these dying patients were valuable and so a market developed in which these policies were bought by investors, who would give the AIDS sufferer a lump sum and would pay for their care during the terminal illness. Then, when the patient died, the policy would pay out. The catch for investors was that the longer the patient lived, the less money they would make. “There have been some phenomenal returns,” said the president of one company that specialized in viaticals, “but there have also been some horror stories where people live longer.”

When we give over control of policies to corporations who are required to deliver a profit to shareholders, we contribute to the erosion of values and ethics on which our society is predicated.  Whether it’s paying a middleman to get you a ticket to see a doctor in Beijing, outsourcing a war to private military contractors or paying a city to be a storage dump for radioactive nuclear waste – when everything has a price tag, asks Sandel, what does it mean to both the scale of inequality as well as the corruption of values in doing something because it is intrinsically good or right?

I’ve been reflecting on this now that I’m up close in a city I love but that is heavily defined and influenced by Wall Street, with its focus on money markets and corporate profits.  We live in an age where progress is defined by increasing our choice of brands rather than what contributes to the sustainability of our planet.  The lack of connection between financial transactions made by brokers on Wall Street to people losing their homes on main street seems to define some financial traders’ disconnect to valuing a world of humans – I heard one trader speak recently of ‘ripping someone’s face off before they rip ours off’ – apparently a commonly used term on Wall Street.  This focus does at least raise questions such as ‘what is the quality of human interaction being cultivated by our economic system? ‘What contributes to the dignity of work rather than exploitation.’ ‘Does focus on money alone for self-interest impoverish our inner lives?’

A Hindu monk said to me recently that our desire for freedom and connection are two of the greatest human needs and I think he’s right.  I’ve seen that play out in my own life.  I listened as he talked of honoring the chain of human connection that binds us while also giving space for individual expression and journeying.

As I finished Sandel’s book, Josh called me over to Abington Square Park near my apartment to meet three new friends, a well known singer, a therapist and an environmentalist who met and bonded over the therapist’s sheep dog. We laughed and talked as people smiled and walked by, many having their own dog bonding moments.  A day earlier there was a gorgeous array of street fairs in the neighborhood where people planted spring bulbs along the streets in celebration of new life.

That night Josh played Shane Howard’s 2010 record, Goanna Dreaming and, as I danced, in my mind I was freefalling back to Australia to when I was driving across the Kimberley, windows down under a night sky feeling so connected to land and sea and sky, to dreaming country and singing spirits. Watching Howard’s YouTube clip, Back in Time, with its grainy haze of Polaroid shots capturing a blue Holden station wagon lit with friends, I was a teenager again wanting to pull on a pair of jeans, climb into a 1960s white Ford Falcon with my own dog and drive into the outback. “You come visit me again in my country, sista,” an Aboriginal woman from the Kimberley said to me recently at the Australian Consulate in New York after we’d swapped stories of people we knew in Broome, “come see me and my sisters and we’ll take you out bush.”

We carry these multiple identities – reader, Australian, Kimberley girl, New York resident, daughter, sister, friend, dog lover, humanitarian, feminist, global citizen — as we see-saw back in time. It’s true, I think, that the most control we have is over our own reaction to circumstances and to how we see ourselves.

In her profoundly moving memoir, Prague Winter, Madeleine Albright writes ‘I have spent a lifetime looking for remedies to all manner of life’s problems – personal social, political, global. I am deeply suspicious of those who offer simple solutions and statements of absolute certainty or who claim full possession of the truth.  Yet I have grown equally skeptical of those who suggest that all is too nuanced and complex for us to learn any lessons, that there are so many sides to everything and that we can pursue knowledge every day of our lives and still know nothing for sure.  I believe we can recognize truth when we see it, just not always at first, and not without ever relenting in our efforts to know more.  This is because the goal we seek, and the good we hope for, comes not as some final reward but as the hidden companion to our quest.  It is not what we find, but the reason we cannot stop looking and striving that tells us why we are here.’

So the night grows dark. As I type this I have on my rainbow moonstone, newly charged from the sea. I hope it will give me strength for the journey.

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

ee cummings

Jane Sloane