BETTING ON THE NEXT TYPHOON

Today, betting on the lives of strangers is no longer an isolated parlour game but a major industry.

Following the devastation wrought by Typhoon Haiyan in The Philippines and the increasing likelihood of further such catastrophic storms, will the peddlers in the death-prediction industry, known as futures, now turn their attentions to such events as a further instance of the intrusion of market-orientated thinking into public life?

When markets in death become familiar and routine, the moral opprobrium is not easy to retain.

There already exists a huge international market in financial products based on predicting - and hoping for - the death of individuals. Insurance, as we experience it, began in the London Coffee house Lloyds when wealthy ship owners sought to cover their risks, but then also sought to make money by gambling on the likely success of a ship returning to port.

As today's massive market in life and death attests, the hard-fought efforts to disentangle insurance from gambling has come undone.

The counter-impulse among people is the solidarity that is evoked by cataclysms such as Typhoon Haiyan.

Altruism, generosity and civic spirit are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are more like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise.

The increasing penetration of market-orientated thinking and practice into our daily lives is unfair and corrupt. It requires opposition, in order to avoid further public costs in the pursuit of private profit.

One of the defects of a market-driven society is that it lets these virtues languish. To renew our public life we need to exercise them more strenuously.

As often is the case, Shakespeare had a metaphorical handle on this threat some time ago.

I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds 


Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen 


The ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam, 


To be exalted with the threatening clouds: 


But never till to-night, never till now,

Did I go through a tempest dropping fire. 


Either there is a civil strife in heaven, 


Or else the world, too saucy with the gods, 


Incenses them to send destruction.

The destruction is sent to our social life. The civil strife is caused by an overpowering market-orientated and financial discourse that sells itself as neutral, while it is traducing public morals and damning citizens to poverty and death.

While gambling on their deaths.

What Money Can't Buy - The Moral Limits of Markets: Michael Sandel; book; Allen Lane; London; 2012

Julius Caesar: William Shakespeare; play; London; 1599

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