The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [28]
Americans are inveigled by a powerful mirage: that markets don’t ration. In 2007, the Congressional Budget Office issued a report about how the nation might bring spiraling health-care costs under control by measuring the cost-effectiveness of medical treatments, as several other countries do. The report warned that putting a price on life might be politically tricky in the United States. “Many people find the notion uncomfortable if not objectionable,” noted the CBO, incompatible with “the sentiment that no expense should be spared to extend a patient’s life.” The invisible hand of the market is as ruthless in denying health care to the needy as the most coldhearted central planner. Our unwillingness to acknowledge life’s price does not mean it doesn’t have one.
CHAPTER THREE
The Price of Happiness
ONE OF MEXICO’S most famous cultural exports, alongside mariachi bands and drunken spring break in Cancún, is the 1979 telenovela titled Los Ricos También Lloran, or The Rich Also Weep. Dubbed into two dozen languages, the epic soap opera’s tale of the trials and tribulations of a lovely young heiress, Mariana, captivated millions of viewers in more than a hundred countries.
The show was exported to China and Saudi Arabia. It gave Russia a first taste of capitalist pop culture, drawing an audience of 100 million after making its debut there in May of 1992, shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union. President Boris Yeltsin was a fan. According to the Russian newspaper Pravda, soldiers from Abkhazia and Georgia would reach a tacit truce during showtimes in order to watch the show.
The telenovela’s plotline is of byzantine complexity. Mariana, the heroine, is ejected from the family ranch by an evil stepmother. A wealthy benefactor takes her in. The benefactor’s handsome son woos her. Her love for the young man is thwarted by a rival, consummated, tested by jealousy. Somehow—don’t ask—Mariana decides to give their baby son, Beto, to a woman who sells lottery tickets. Only after she encounters Beto years later and prevents his father from shooting him will she be happy.
Despite the idiosyncratic plot twists, and the actors clad in bell-bottoms, the telenovela appealed to millions because it tapped into a romantic archetype, that of the helpless heroine who falls into the lap of luxury yet cannot find happiness until she finds true love. Its message—though delivered in a style of high camp—resonates across time around the world: we may think wealth provides happiness, but they are unrelated.
The point had been made over a century earlier by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who argued that “money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.”
In March of 1968, three months before he was shot to death, Robert Kennedy delivered a scathing critique of the nation’s fixation on economic growth: “Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl,” he said.
“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
This age-old conviction is undergoing a bit of a revival. As people around the world struggled with the fallout from the global financial crisis and a worldwide recession,