It is easy to dismiss the recent furore over surge pricing of tickets for the Oasis reunion gigs.
The product for sale is hardly essential, even for people like me, diehard fans from the olden days (who also support Man City).
The targeted consumer is hardly oppressed – most Oasis fans are likely to be middle-aged men at this point, with more disposable income than they could have dreamt of when they were teenagers singing “I’m free to be whatever I… whatever I choose” in their bedrooms.
And while governments have been spurred into action by the extortionate prices being charged, they were largely silent when the same trick was played on Taylor Swift fans earlier in the year – gigs where arguably the average fan was considerably less powerful.
Here in Ireland, tickets that were notionally priced at €86.50 ended up averaging €347. And my neighbours where I live in Kildare were especially hard hit, with a statistical analysis revealing they paid on average €466 each.
Maybe this is a sign that Ireland is in a bubble. I can imagine people tut-tutting and whispering “more money than sense”.
But maybe there is something instructive about our instinctive dismay that people could be excited about a product at Price A and then find they have to pay Price B.
There is, in fact, ancient Christian wisdom to draw upon to put a shape on this moral intuition. Throughout the medieval era, Christian theologians were deeply involved in questions we now delegate to economists. As the historian RH Tawney put it in his famous Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, for these thinkers, “trade is necessary, but perilous to the soul.” The reason for this is that unlike a carpenter who makes something, or a doctor who provides a service, the trader is always on the edge of becoming exploitative. He neither makes nor serves, but simple mediates, taking a cut from the purchaser, but also often profiting from his suppliers.
We now live in an entirely different moral imagination, where – with good reason! – the mediating role of the trader is considered in a far more positive light. They offer all kinds of economic efficiencies and social benefits that the medieval mind did not perceive – curating and maintaining quality, offering aftersales service, and most importantly, by handling the logistical complications of trade which is much trickier than might first seem.
The dynamic pricing that Oasis and Ticketmaster deployed is, argues a certain kind of economist, a rational response to scarcity. For one thing, they would argue, it is just what the market does in normal functioning, albeit in an accelerated fashion. And the hard reality is that in a world where the number of people who will pay to hear Wonderwall with both Liam and Noel on stage together exceeds the places available in even the largest stadiums, surge pricing is more efficient and better for the economy than first-come, first-served.
But examples like surge pricing remind us that our forebears might have been on to something. For figures like Thomas Aquinas, there is no fundamental private property right. They grant that in a fallen world, some people will be able to acquire more but mere possession does not generate some untouchable metaphysical claim over wealth or assets. Our private ownership has to be undercut by our communal need.
It is important to note that this idea is not an appeal to benevolent charity – that business people should from the goodness of their hearts distribute their stock to whoever might need it. No, it is in fact, the shape of rightly-ordered commerce. A just exchange is one where there is reciprocal proportionality. A woman left to race against men in a sprint is not a just race. A toddler forced to compete with an adult would not be a just competition. And “buying and selling seem to be established for the common advantage of both parties. … Now whatever is established for the common advantage, should not be more of a burden to one party than to another, and consequently all contracts between them should observe equality of thing and thing” (ST II-II, q. 77, a. 1.).
But Aquinas knows that there are some transactions that are essential and some that are more volitional. And more, he knows that there are things we really want to buy and other things that we just fancy, if the circumstances seem right (like Oasis tickets?). In such a setting, “it will be lawful to sell a thing for more than it is worth in itself, though the price paid be not more than it is worth to the owner” (Ibid.).
But for Aquinas, market demand is not the only factor at play in this question. A just price is one that reflects the effort of production for whatever is being sold. Surge pricing could be justified in a situation where circumstances increase the difficulty of market provision – for example a taxi driver taking on increased risk to drive in the snow – but if the product costs the same effort to produce whether 5 people want to buy or 5 million people want it, then surge pricing is not justice, it is stealing. We’ll have to leave it to Noel and Liam to discern whether their tickets were sold in the context of increased hardship or whether they are profiteers.
While Irish concert-goers were left exasperated as they tried to relive the halcyon days of the 1990s, the reason they couldn’t make an argument for why what they experienced was wrong is because they have lost the language of just price. We live in a world that can only imagine a market price and the Oasis foofaraw was a window back into an earlier age where the sheer injustice of people being allowed to exploit their market advantage so brazenly would have been felt in the same way as scandalous, but they could have morally reasoned about it as well.
What would the result of the moral reasoning be? Ancient Christian thinking wouldn’t just put words to your instincts. It also would explain how to avoid this scenario emerging again. In a classic article from 2015, the Scottish theologian Brian Brock explodes the origin myth of capitalism. Trade didn’t emerge as a natural byproduct of human society. It slowly emerged in the form that Adam Smith came to recognise it by centuries of political negotiation.
When the idea of a just price dominated, it was paired with the idea of the fixed market. Our city squares across Europe testify to this – the square was the place that the city leaders or the monarch allowed trade to take place. There were rules about when this could happen. The fixity of place and time ensured that the traders were held accountable. There was competition – one trader could not have monopoly – and there was oversight – the State could enforce reciprocal justice if a trader, a cabal or traders sought to manipulate the market.
The implication can’t be more obvious. Thomas Aquinas’ masterplan would conclude Oasis and Ticketmaster were exploitative and he would call on the legislators to refashion the market so that there was competition and regulation. But some might say we’re half a world away from sharing Thomas’ moral clarity.
