This is why I love TED.
Today’s TED Talk email suggested watching two brilliant people who
present opposite ideas about the use of markets to solve social problems.
Michael Sandel’s talk is titled “Why we shouldn’t trust
markets with our civic life.”
Michael Porter’s talk is titled “Why business can be good at
solving social problems.”
This was not set up as a debate. They both presented at TED Global in June but
they have both made these cases independently before. What makes this great is that both of these
are brilliant thinkers and make convincing cases. You get a fantastic opportunity to practice
your dialectic reasoning skills. Full
disclosure – I have read both of their books and other publications on the
subject so I just skimmed through the TED talks. But it seems they have covered
all the basics in their 15 minutes of TED fame.
And as usual, the answer is “it depends” – which as you know
is my favorite answer. If designed
properly and applied to the right situations, the free market model can
work. But applied poorly or to the wrong
situation and it is doomed to fail or make things even worse. But these two thought leaders are worth listening
to because they go into some great details about when, where, why, and how to
either leverage the market approach or remove it. It would be great if they would work together
so that it makes it easy to resolve the differences, but they haven’t done this
yet.
