Theft at the Public Till
unique to them have slowly been replaced by external economic standards that are meant to be common to all practices. Increasingly, we have come to use the amount of money society is willing to pay people as the primary indication of the value society places on what those people do. As economic activity comes increasingly to be dominated by competition for positional goods, decisions about all aspects of life come increasingly to have an eco- nomic component. This happens whether people like it or not-whether they want it to or not. This economizing of social relations can have profound effects it can undermine the strength of the social relations themselves. It's hard to keep social relations going if people don't have time for one another. The strength of our concern for the public good may derive in part from the range and depth of our personal, social relations. It is from these relations, after all, that we learn much of what it means to approach domains of life from a non- economic perspective. As these relations diminish, for lack of time, moral concern may diminish with them. A general decrease in sociability is likely to change even the economic incentives to be a good citizen. Suppose that the good turns an individual does are motivated only by the expectation that they will one day be recip- rocated, and nothing more. If you don't overuse the common, neither will I. If you don't dump toxic wastes in my stream, I won't dump them in yours. As an individual's network of social relations shrinks, the likelihood of recip- rocation shrinks with it. Therefore, each decrease in social connectedness brings a corresponding decrease in the possibility of concerted action to solve the various commons problems each of us faces. Since many of our social activities are increasingly taking on an eco- nomic aspect, some economists have suggested that we should take these domains out of the economic closet and treat them explicitly as part of economic life. We should enlarge the consumer's potential market basket to include not just stereos, vacations, and dinners out but time spent chatting with friends as well. Even if we don't literally put dollar values on the time people spend with friends, there ought to be some way to estimate the dollar value equivalents of social activities, perhaps by examining how many things
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