Warmoak T sends a note, regarding this story.

Excerpt:

Economists are asking the wrong question, Mr. Bloom said at the panel. They assume that “everything is subject to market pricing unless proven otherwise.”

“The problem is not that economists are unreasonable people, it’s that they’re evil people,” he said. “They work in a different moral universe. The burden of proof is on someone who wants to include” a transaction in the marketplace. (Mr. Roth, who acknowledges that “economists see very few tradeoffs as completely taboo,” did not take the criticism personally.)

The theologian Michael Novak, who is also a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, similarly argued that “not all ethical principles fit under economic reasoning,” adding, “the resistance to money is very old and very deep.”

T points out that "An e-mail supposedly clarified Dr. Bloom's position:"

Just to clarify, my remark about evil economists was a joke. This was obvious at the conference itself, though unfortunately not from the NYTimes article.

Well. Here are my thoughts:

The desire to commit rape is also very old and very deep. But it is morally repugnant, and modern society has managed to force men to suppress this desire, partly through socialization and partly through the threat of punishment as a deterrent. Now, most of us agree that rape is a truly terrible crime.

Envy is also an ancient impulse, "very old and very deep." And it is not nearly as awful as the desire commit rape. But it is still bad. Why do government institutions, and psycho-babble "scholars," get to raise the morally repugnant impulse of envy to the status of a virtue? Society will only progress if we begin to treat envy, and the desire to control other peoples' property and bodies, the way we have already ostracized baser impulses.

Some other thoughts here.

(A caveat, to the hysteria-and-anxiety-professionals out there: The impulse to rape is morally more repugnant than the impulse to act on envy. They are similar in kind, but much different in the degree to which they invade one's person and one's dignity. Although, the forcible theft of property and livelihood based on "fairness", the brittle mask envy wears in the moral universe, can come close to rape in its effects. But, yes, rape is worse. My point is only that the fact that an impulse is "very old and very deep" doesn't make it right: rape is old and deep. It's wrong. Distrust of money, based on envy and superstition, is old and deep. It's wrong, too).