What can't be sold

"Say my name!"

I win a ticket to an excellent Broadway play next month. I’m looking forward to going, but something comes up, and I can’t make it to New York. I tell this to a good friend and she says that she’ll be in New York then, and would love to see the play herself.

Should I offer her the ticket?

Of course. I can’t enjoy the experience, so why should it go to waste? And when she calls me afterwards to thank me and tell me what a wonderful time she had, I feel nothing but satisfaction, both for her happiness and because I got to be a good friend.

As an even simpler case, I’m done eating, and my friend says “I see you haven’t touched your fries, can I have them?”

What sort of monster would say no?

More generally,

If you possess something that you can’t use and someone else can benefit from it, there’s no harm in handing it over. It’s nice!

Another case: Suppose I could have attended the show, but then someone offers to buy the ticket. If I want the money more than I want the ticket, this is a good thing all over. Gains from trade, as the expression goes. More generally,

If you possess something and someone offers you something for it (such as money) and you willingly accept, it’s a good thing.

Now change the example: I’m at a conference sitting in the audience with a friend and after a speaker is finished, I think of a really clever comment. But I have laryngitis, so I lean over and whisper it to my friend. Neat idea, she whispers back. Mind if I raise it? Sure, I say. She then raises her hand and delivers it … and the audience gasps at her brilliance.

How do I feel? Not entirely happy, I bet. But why? I couldn’t get the credit; so why not pass it on to her? That is, why doens’t this principle

If you possess something that you can’t use and someone else can benefit from it, there’s no harm in handing it over. It’s nice!

work for this example?

(Importantly, this isn’t like someone taking your idea without your permission and getting credit for it. It’s understandable why that would be upsetting; it’s just the same as someone stealing your theatre ticket or your french fries. The best example here comes from this wonderful Kay & Peele skit. Stop and watch it.)

Or go back to this principle:

If you possess something and someone offers you something for it (such as money) and you willingly accept, it’s a good thing.

If I sell you my theatre ticket, I’m not upset at the idea of you using it. But, again, this doesn’t fully work for credit. I was sparked to think about this by an article in the New Yorker by J. R. Moehringer, the ghostwriter of the excellent autobiography (or “autobiography”) of Prince Harry—“Spare”. Years earlier, he was the ghostwriter of this book …

… and he tells this story:

“Open,” by Andre Agassi, was published on November 9, 2009. Andre was pleased, reviewers were complimentary, and I soon had offers to ghost other people’s memoirs. Before deciding what to do next, I needed to get away, clear my head. I went to the Green Mountains. For two days, I drove around, stopped at wayside meadows, sat under trees and watched the clouds—until one late afternoon I began feeling unwell. I bought some cold medicine, pulled into the first bed-and-breakfast I saw, and climbed into bed. Hand-sewn quilt under my chin, I switched on the TV. There was Andre, on a late-night talk show.

The host was praising “Open,” and Agassi was being his typical charming, humble self. Now the host was praising the writing. Agassi continued to be humble. Thank you, thank you. But I dared to hope he might mention . . . me? An indefensible, illogical hope: Andre had asked me to put my name on the cover, and I’d declined. Nevertheless, right before zonking out, I started muttering at the TV, “Say my name.” I got a bit louder. “Say my name!” I got pretty rowdy. “Say my fucking name!”

Seven hours later, I stumbled downstairs to the breakfast room and caught a weird vibe. Guests stared. Several peered over my shoulder to see who was with me. What the? I sat alone, eating some pancakes, until I got it. The bed-and-breakfast had to be three hundred years old, with walls made of pre-Revolutionary cardboard—clearly every guest had heard me. Say my name!

But why was Moehringer so upset? He knew the deal; he wrote books about the lives of celebrities and let them pretend that they were the authors. For this, he got paid well.

One possibility is that he was bothered by the lying. By not mentioning his ghostwriter, Agassi is taking credit for words that he didn’t write, and fooling everyone who is listening. This works for my earlier example too. If people at the conference thought my friend came up with the clever comment, and she does nothing to correct this impression, then she is lying to them.

Lying is one reason we get so upset by plagiarism. When my student copies a passage from Amos Tversky and doesn’t include quotation marks or a citation, he’s lying to me, trying to trick me into thinking that he wrote it. And that justly pisses me off.

But this didn’t seem to be what bothered J. R. Moehringer. It was personal. He was injured. But why? He had made the deal, after all. If Moehringer had sold Agassi the shirt he was wearing on the talk show and the host complimented it, Moehringer wouldn’t start screaming “Tell them it’s my fucking shirt!” But what’s the difference?

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Here’s what I think is going on here.

There are all sorts of things we can freely buy and sell. Theatre tickets and french fries, but also animals, plots of land, physical labor, and certainly what’s called “intellectual property”, such as jokes, recipes, songs, poems, and the many thousands of words that make up Spare and Agassi.

There are some things that are wrong to buy and sell. Here are some candidates for such things, taken from Michael Sandel’s book, What Money Can’t Buy.

• Sex

• Prison cell upgrades (offered in some California cities, at least when Sandel wrote his book)

• Access to carpool lanes when you drive solo

• Carrying a baby to term (“surrogacy”)

• Citizenship

• Kidneys and other body parts

• Babies

• Compulsory military service

• Votes

• Grades

One argument against selling such things is that the transactions have negative externalities. I might be happy selling my vote to a rich person and he might be happy buying it from me, but overall, such a transaction is corrosive to democracy and harms people who are not involved in the deal. Selling grades to my students has externalities that are bad in a different way.

Also, some market transactions might increase inequality within a society to an unacceptable degree. You might think that when there’s a draft, everyone should have to serve, the rich as well as the poor. In Canada (more than in the United States), many people feel this way about health care. It’s fine for my richer neighbours to have a nicer house and a nice car, but they shouldn’t be allowed to have a shorter wait for a knee replacement.

Then there is what Sandel calls corruption. The classic example here is sex. For many, to pay for sex degrades the buyer, degrades the seller, and, in some fuzzier way, harms society more generally.

Opinions certainly differ on all this; the only point I’ll make here is that for all of these cases, money really can (and does) buy these things, at least in certain times and places, Sandel’s concern is over the morality of such transactions. His title has a nice ring, but it would be more correct to call it, What Money Shouldn’t Buy.

Is there anything that money really can’t buy? Sure. You can’t sell accomplishments or traits. If you win an Olympic gold medal in fencing, you can sell the medal itself, but you can’t sell the state of having won an Olympic competition. If you are a war hero, a supportive friend, or a great scholar, you can’t sell these things to anyone and nobody can buy them from you. (And you can’t give them away either.) It’s not that such transactions are wrong; it’s that they are impossible. Your past acts and attributes stick to you.

What people can do is engage in a sort of deception. You can tell your war hero stories to a billionaire and he can pay you to keep your mouth shut when he tells those stories to others and pretends that he did those things. But the transaction here with you passing on stories (something that can be bought) plus an agreement to be complicit in a lie. The actual “being a war hero” doesn’t go anywhere.

To take a more realistic case, I can sell you a joke and you get to use it in your act, but the making-of-the-joke is non-transferable. What actually happens is that we agree to let people believe that you created the joke. (It’s not like comedians hand out a list of acknowledgments at the end of their acts.)

This sort of thing is common. A lot of well-known intellectuals get help in writing their papers and books, including having students or research assistants write sections of them, and the writing itself gets attributed to the intellectuals. If you type in “famous John F. Kennedy quotes”, you’ll end up reading the words of Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy’s speechwriter. Who gets credit for: “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear down this wall!”? I hope you didn’t say Ronald Reagan; it was his speechwriter Peter Robinson. Talk show hosts have writer’s rooms; CEOs and university presidents sign emails that their staff members write. Responding to those who sneer at his profession, Moehringer responds by saying that ghostwriters keep publishing afloat:

most of the titles on this week’s best-seller list were written by someone besides the named author.

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Two thoughts about all this:

First, I can see why this system benefits the powerful, but it’s strange that the rest of us put up with this. If a student at a university gets caught putting his name on a document that someone else wrote, they are in a world of trouble, but when the president of the university does this, nobody cares. Maybe we should. Maybe the publisher of Spare should be shocked at the very idea that the book would have “Prince Harry” on the cover, rather than "J. R. Moehringer”—perhaps with an added “in conversation with Prince Harry”. When I publish in outlets such as The Atlantic and The New Yorker, I get help from excellent editors, and some of the words that end up in my articles are theirs, not mine. Why aren’t their names also on my pieces?

I know there are bigger problems in the world, but, again, it’s puzzling why everyone is so comfortable with this way of doing things. I think we shouldn’t be.

And second, I think we can understand better why are uncomfortable in cases where others get credit for what we’ve done—even with our permission, even if we get fairly paid.

We are upset because it’s a fiction. We are pretending to transfer something that can’t be transferred. Nothing has changed—no matter how much Agassi paid, the credit sticks with Moehringer. And so Moehringer is right. Agassi should say his fucking name.