"that moral is gonna costs you $2.99, m'am."

I was sent Sir Jonathan Sacks' article 'Morals: the one thing markets don't make' by my former economics lecturer the other day and found it, if not fascinating and novel, very very good sense. Sir Jonathan Sacks happens to be the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, and has written several works on ethics in the today's world.

His pointed out the tendency of capitalism to put a price on everything, and forget about value. His used the inflation and burst of the housing bubble as an example. People forgot that houses were meant to be shelters and refuges, and decided to transform them into trading cards, until prices became hard-to-reach and those who wanted a home realised they needed to get in the game too. This doesn't mean that we should kill capitalism and have the government built uniform huts across the country however. Markets are necessary and will probably be for a good length of time. But, they need morals. And morals are not created by markets, but by tradition, customs, religion, schools, and people with a lot of good sense.

I shan't divert this little summary to talk about what morals are based on, and whether truth is absolute or relative, and how decide who are the 'people with a lot of good sense' etc. That's another quandary all by itself. However, it did make me start thinking about what to do with the next 3 months.

After finishing the final undergraduate examination of my life last Monday, I am now faced with 3 months of unprogrammed time until I fly to the States and start my PhD in August. As I swept the floor at home and tried to figure out whose hair was falling out the most rapidly in my family, the bugging sensation that I should be earning money suddenly crept up on me again! Money, it seems, easily becomes the driving force for all activity. It is like the approving nod of the divine, pronouncing an activity Worthy To Be Done. Unpaid activities must be value-less. It is felt then, that if one has 4 intact limbs and a functional mind, one should be capitalizing on one's income-generating capacity. Aaron and I sometimes argue that this is purely a Singaporean mentality which has placed a disproportionate amount of emphasis on productivity. I don't know, I think it's a pretty prevalent phenomena in most developed countries though. True, it seems that gap years are a LOT more acceptable overseas. Then again, people who have chosen a gap life tend to be termed 'bums', 'poor dears', or at best 'artists'.

I wonder if this is why mothers stuck at home with young children, feel like they're not really 'contributing to society'. I am absolutely not judging couples where both parents need to work to provide a decent standard of living. To the contrary, it shows that the unbalanced position of monetary rewards (only rewarding services and products which can be consumed , instead of all activities of value) in combination with a sole reliance on such rewards to direct action, is dangerous. Since no one's paying them to do it, why do it? For a long time, there was no price on being environmentally unfriendly either, so we left our carbon footprints all over the place until Mother Nature started screaming at us to wipe our feet on the rug before coming in.

An English college student set out on a walk to India about a year ago, inspired by Gandhi and a stay in a village where money did not exist said, "As long as society remains capitalist we will never have a true sense of community, and environmental destruction will continue unabated. Economic growth is completely dependent on us destroying our environment."

That's why, I guess, governments are supposed to intervene and put values on such activities with intangible benefit (and penalities on those with intangible harm). But caught in a globalised world where products and services can easily be traded, but not environmental protection or social security, they too are in a bind as to how much of a reward they can give to a moral conscience.

If only we could find a way to mass produce some goodness.