Behind the Choice of a Luxury-Bag Pitchman

Louis Vuitton

The 70-year-old Muhammad Ali will be the next Louis Vuitton icon.

Print ads featuring the boxing champion will launch June 14, in the latest installment of an ad campaign that has featured Mikhail Gorbachev, soccer great Pelé, musician Keith Richards and, most recently, actress Angelina Jolie, who was shown floating on a Cambodian boat with a Louis Vuitton "Alto" bag at her side.

The ad, which will run in magazines and newspapers in 60 countries, seems to capture Mr. Ali in private reverie. Photographed last month by Annie Leibovitz in his Phoenix backyard, Mr. Ali watches with pleasure as a young boy stands with fists gloved, feet splayed, chest puffed. Though not identified in the ad, the child is his grandson, Curtis Muhammad Conway Jr. A $1,525 Louis Vuitton "Keepall 50" bag lies by Mr. Ali's left foot.

As it released a first look at the Ali ad, the company offered a window on how it chooses its eclectic group of pitchmen. Louis Vuitton, now part of the LVMH luxury conglomerate, started as a French luggage maker in the 19th century. While many consumers associate the brand with its "LV" logo wallets and handbags—or with its clothing designer, Marc Jacobs—the company sees travel and journeys as the central message of its marketing and hammers home the idea that there should be a Louis Vuitton bag along on any great journey.

It is common to see a pile of LV steamer trunks in the windows of a Louis Vuitton store—even though very few consumers are in the market for a logo steamer trunk. When the brand introduced its fall 2012 ready-to-wear collection in Paris in March, it designed a steam train to pull into a large tent by the Louvre, where the models stepped out of a train car accompanied by attendants loaded with handbags and luggage.

Louis Vuitton

A 2011 ad featuring Angelina Jolie.

The company since 2007 has focused its ads on iconic individuals whose lives can be seen as extraordinary journeys. "We are a very specific brand—we are the only one bound with travel," says Yves Carcelle, Louis Vuitton's chairman and chief executive.

The campaign, which the company refers to as "Core Values," was the brainchild of Antoine Arnault, son of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault. While its execution is overseen by the Ogilvy & Mather ad agency, the list of human icons came from a meeting in which Louis Vuitton executives volunteered their own heroes. The result was a list that has included Andre Agassi, Sean Connery, and Catherine Deneuve. Mr. Ali was a hero chosen by Mr. Carcelle, as well as several others in the room, Mr. Carcelle says.

Mr. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, was the campaign's first subject in 2007. He was seated in the back seat of a limo passing a remnant of the Berlin Wall, a Vuitton Keepall 50 bag on the seat beside him. Many people found that ad memorable—and it still wins kudos in the ad world. "Everybody remembers that," says Jan Wilker, partner at New York design firm KarlssonWilker Inc.

That and later Core Values ads have won a host of annual awards around the world—including Webbies, a Grand Prix du Luxe Strategies from Condé Nast, and a prize from the French Club des Directeur Artistiques. The company won a Clio in 2008 for its filmed ad "A Journey," which displays languid images of travel with a voice-over that refers to journeys and subtly flashes the LV logo at the end.

The "Core Values" campaign stands out in a sea of fashion advertising because it features people who have accomplished a lot and endorse little. Mr. Ali has lent his image to few products, though he has done ads for Apple AAPL +1.51% and Adidas. The Vuitton collaboration took "many, many months" to negotiate, according to a person familiar with the discussions, which involved Mr. Ali's requests that it be shot at his home and include his grandson.

The heroes so far have been short on racial minorities and people under 40. Ms. Jolie is the youngest of the group, at 37. Before Mr. Ali, the only black icon was soccer great Pelé, in 2010. Mr. Carcelle says the company doesn't consider race in its marketing and isn't seeking to market to minority consumers in particular. "We never think about that," he said.

The company won't disclose how much Mr. Ali was paid, but officials said payments were made to Mr. Ali's two organizations, one a personal business enterprise and the other an educational foundation. The ad, whose tagline reads, "Some stars show you the way," includes a Web link that refers to Mr. Ali's most famous boast: louisvuittonjourneys.com/thegreatest.

The three-year-old in the photo, who is often called "C.J.," is the son of Mr. Ali's daughter Laila, a retired boxer, and her husband, former National Football League player Curtis Conway.

Lonnie Ali, the fighter's wife, says Mr. Ali requested that his grandson be photographed with him. "The two share a special bond. "Of all the grandchildren, C.J. looks the most like Muhammad. And he even acts like him," Mrs. Ali said. "That child—I'll tell you!"

Eclectic Picks

Louis Vuitton has featured more than a dozen famous faces in its bag ads over the past five years.

2012: Muhammad Ali

2011: Angelina Jolie

2010: Mikhail Baryshnikov with Annie Leibovitz; Pelé with Diego Maradona and Zinedine Zidane; Ali Hewson with Bono

2009: Buzz Aldrin with Jim Lovell and Sally Ride

2008: Keith Richards, Sean Connery; Francis Ford Coppola with his daughter Sofia

2007: Mikhail Gorbachev, Catherine Deneuve; AndréAgassi with Steffi Graf

Write to Christina Binkley at christina.binkley@wsj.com or follow her on Twitter: @BinkleyOnStyle

FDR's D-Day Prayer

By WARREN KOZAK

Franklin Roosevelt is not remembered for his religious dogma. Yet 68 years ago on the night of June 6, as tens of thousands of American and Allied forces were flung into a caldron of fire in Western Europe, the president and commander in chief sought to calm an anxious nation as he spoke to his people. It was a presidential address that stands out as a testament to how much our nation has changed since that evening in the late spring of 1944.

Beginning around midnight the night before, elements of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions had landed behind enemy lines in France. They were followed seven hours later by massive landings on beaches in Normandy code-named Sword, Juneau, Gold, Omaha and Utah.

Americans began hearing special reports in the middle of the night and they continued to follow events closely throughout the day. At lunch counters and in offices and factories, people clustered around their radios. So it was both natural and necessary that the president say something.

Yet instead of giving a news account—something Americans had already heard from network radio news and read in their evening papers—Franklin Roosevelt chose a different course. He led the nation in prayer.

"Almighty God," Roosevelt began, "Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

"Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith."

Associated Press

President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944.

There were mothers and fathers listening intently to that broadcast whose sons were already caught up in the middle of it all. Some of those young men were already lost. Roosevelt understood this, yet he never sugarcoated the realities.

"They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest until victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and by flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war."

"Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, thy heroic servants, into thy kingdom."

Somehow, Roosevelt understood what the nation needed to hear. This was an American president unafraid to embrace God and to define an enemy that clearly rejected the norms of humanity. And if the nature of the enemy was not clear to everyone that night, it would be made resoundingly clear as the armies advanced into Germany 10 months later. But Roosevelt also knew that the nation would have to stay true to its course, and for that he offered a moment as well.

"Oh Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled."

"With thy blessing we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances."

Americans hung on every word. They needed to rededicate and redouble their efforts, much as Lincoln had reminded them at Gettysburg in the middle of another dark period. Now, almost an equal time has passed since D-Day, and it seems strangely difficult for our leaders to clearly define our values, our way of life, our causes for going to war to defend our ideals. It is unfathomable today that a president would embrace God the way Roosevelt did on that night.

Imagine a president, any president, sitting in the Oval Office ending an address to the nation, in a slow, deliberate cadence, like this:

"Thy will be done, Almighty God.

Amen."

Yet that is how Franklin Roosevelt signed off that D-Day night.

Mr. Kozak is the author of "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay" (Regnery, 2009).

With Plan X, Pentagon seeks to spread U.S. military might to cyberspace

The Pentagon is turning to the private sector, universities and even computer-game companies as part of an ambitious effort to develop technologies to improve its cyberwarfare capabilities, launch effective attacks and withstand the likely retaliation.

The previously unreported effort, which its authors have dubbed Plan X, marks a new phase in the nation’s fledgling military operations in cyberspace, which have focused more on protecting the Defense Department’s computer systems than on disrupting or destroying those of enemies.

Plan X is a project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon division that focuses on experimental efforts and has a key role in harnessing computing power to help the military wage war more effectively.

“If they can do it, it’s a really big deal,” said Herbert S. Lin, a cybersecurity expert with the National Research Council of the National Academies. “If they achieve it, they’re talking about being able to dominate the digital battlefield just like they do the traditional battlefield.”

Cyberwarfare conjures images of smoking servers, downed electrical systems and exploding industrial plants, but military officials say cyberweapons are unlikely to be used on their own. Instead, they would support conventional attacks, by blinding an enemy to an impending airstrike, for example, or disabling a foe’s communications system during battle.

The five-year, $110 million research program will begin seeking proposals this summer. Among the goals will be the creation of an advanced map that details the entirety of cyberspace — a global domain that includestens of billions of computers and other devices — and updates itself continuously. Such a map would help commanders identify targets and disable them using computer code delivered through the Internet or other means.

Another goal is the creation of a robust operating system capable of launching attacks and surviving counterattacks. Officials say this would be the cyberspace equivalent of an armored tank; they compare existing computer operating systems to sport-utility vehicles — well suited to peaceful highways but too vulnerable to work on battlefields.

The architects of Plan X also hope to develop systems that could give commanders the ability to carry out speed-of-light attacks and counterattacks using preplanned scenarios that do not involve human operators manually typing in code — a process considered much too slow.

Officials compare this to flying an airplane on autopilot along predetermined routes.

It makes sense “to take this on right now,” said Richard M. George, a former National Security Agency cyberdefense official. “Other countries are preparing for a cyberwar. If we’re not pushing the envelope in cyber, somebody else will.”

Military initiative

The shift in focus is significant, said officials from the Pentagon agency, known by the acronym DARPA. Cyber-operations are rooted in the shadowy world of intelligence-gathering and electronic-spying organizations such as the NSA.

Unlike espionage, military cyber­attacks would be aimed at achieving a physical effect — disrupting or shutting down a computer, for example — and probably would be carried out by the U.S. Cyber Command, the organization that was launched in 2010 next to the NSA at Fort Meade.

Tom Manion: Why They Serve—'If Not Me, Then Who?'

By TOM MANION

I served in the military for 30 years. But it was impossible to fully understand the sacrifices of our troops and their families until April 29, 2007, the day my son, First Lt. Travis Manion, was killed in Iraq.

Travis was just 26 years old when an enemy sniper's bullet pierced his heart after he had just helped save two wounded comrades. Even though our family knew the risks of Travis fighting on the violent streets of Fallujah, being notified of his death on a warm Sunday afternoon in Doylestown, Pa., was the worst moment of our lives.

While my son's life was relatively short, I spend every day marveling at his courage and wisdom. Before his second and final combat deployment, Travis said he wanted to go back to Iraq in order to spare a less-experienced Marine from going in his place. His words—"If not me, then who . . . "—continue to inspire me.

My son is one of thousands to die in combat since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Because of their sacrifices, as well as the heroism of previous generations, Memorial Day 2012 should have tremendous importance to our entire nation, with an impact stretching far beyond one day on the calendar.

In Afghanistan, tens of thousands of American troops continue to sweat, fight and bleed. In April alone, 35 U.S. troops were killed there, including Army Capt. Nick Rozanski, 36, who made the difficult decision to leave his wife and children to serve our country overseas.

"My brother didn't necessarily have to go to Afghanistan," Spc. Alex Rozanski, Nick's younger brother and fellow Ohio National Guard soldier, said. "He chose to because he felt an obligation."

Sgt. Devin Snyder "loved being a girly-girl, wearing her heels and carrying her purses," according to her mother, Dineen Snyder. But Sgt. Snyder, 20, also took it upon herself to put on an Army uniform and serve in the mountains of northeastern Afghanistan as a military police officer. She was killed by an enemy roadside bomb, alongside three fellow soldiers and a civilian contractor, on June 4, 2011.

Air Force Tech. Sgt. Daniel Douville was an explosive ordnance disposal technician, doing an incredibly dangerous job depicted in "The Hurt Locker." He was a loving husband and father of three children. "He was my best friend," his wife, LaShana Douville, said. "He was a good person."

Getty Images

A U.S. Marine in Kajaki, Afghanistan

Douville, 33, was killed in a June 26, 2011, explosion in Afghanistan's Helmand province, where some of the fiercest fighting of the decade-long conflict continues to this day.

When my son died in Iraq, his U.S. Naval Academy roommate, Brendan Looney, was in the middle of BUD/S (basic underwater demolition) training to become a Navy SEAL. Devastated by his good friend's death, Brendan called us in anguish, telling my wife and me that losing Travis was too much for him to handle during the grueling training regimen.

Lt. Brendan Looney overcame his grief to become "Honor Man" of his SEAL class, and he served in Iraq before later deploying to Afghanistan. On Sept. 21, 2010, after completing 58 combat missions, Brendan died with eight fellow warriors when their helicopter crashed in Zabul province. He was 29. Brendan and Travis now rest side-by-side in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery.

"The friendship between First Lt. Travis Manion and Lt. Brendan Looney reflects the meaning of Memorial Day: brotherhood, sacrifice, love of country," President Obama said at Arlington on Memorial Day 2011. "And it is my fervent prayer that we may honor the memory of the fallen by living out those ideals every day of our lives, in the military and beyond."

But the essence of our country, which makes me even prouder than the president's speech, is the way our nation's military families continue to serve. Even after more than a decade of war, these remarkable men and women are still stepping forward.

As the father of a fallen Marine, I hope Americans will treat this Memorial Day as more than a time for pools to open, for barbecues or for a holiday from work. It should be a solemn day to remember heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice, and also a stark reminder that our country is still at war.

For the Rozanskis, Snyders, Douvilles, Looneys and thousands more like us, every day is Memorial Day. If the rest of the nation joins us to renew the spirit of patriotism, service and sacrifice, perhaps America can reunite, on this day of reverence, around the men and women who risk their lives to defend it.

Col. Manion, USMCR (Ret.), is on the board of the Travis Manion Foundation, which assists veterans and the families of the fallen.

Saving Dr. Barnes's Vision

By ERIC GIBSON

Michael Moran/OTTO

The new museum faithfully re-creates the experience of the Barnes's original installation.

Philadelphia

One of the longest and bitterest battles the art world has ever seen—the fight over the future of Philadelphia's storied Barnes Foundation collection—has, for now, anyway, come to an end with the opening of the superb new facility on Benjamin Franklin Parkway. It is a win for both advocates and opponents of the move from the foundation's original location in suburban Merion.

Long in financial peril thanks to a sorry, two-decade-long record of mismanagement, the institution is at last on a sound footing. At the same time, the integrity of Albert C. Barnes's vision has been preserved. The new museum faithfully re-creates the experience of the original installation and makes Dr. Barnes himself present as never before.

Its successful outcome notwithstanding, this was a battle that needed to be joined. For at stake was the future of a one-of-a-kind collection and an important episode in the history of American taste, a subject the general public knows too little about.

For Dr. Barnes was a collector like no other, a man whose contributions to the art life of this country were unprecedented in his time and have been unmatched since. Unlike today's Fashion-Victim Medicis, he didn't chase after the latest hot thing but bought what moved him; didn't regard art collecting as a means of social advancement but as an all-absorbing intellectual and spiritual quest; built a permanent home for his collection as an educational institution, not as a monument to himself.

Central to this didactic purpose were the installations, the so-called "ensembles," nonchronological groupings of objects that mixed media, periods and styles, cultures, fine and decorative arts. Dr. Barnes's aim was twofold: The point of the ensembles was to show the continuity of all art. In particular, Dr. Barnes wanted to show that modern artists were indebted to, rather than dismissive of, the traditions of the past. And in his teachings and writings, Dr. Barnes drew on his scientific background (as well as the writings of Henry James, John Dewey and George Santayana) to bring a new rigor to the criticism of art, replacing approaches he found intellectually flabby or simply beside the point. He emphasized the formal properties of painting—line, color, space and the like. Today his method might seem rather narrow. But it still has value, particularly as a way into a painting for someone with no prior knowledge—Dr. Barnes's intended audience. And it's a welcome antidote to the theory-drenched obscurantism that passes for art criticism today.

In the galleries, Dr. Barnes's curatorial outlook made for some pretty strange artistic bedfellows. One typically head-snapping juxtaposition places a proto-Cubist Picasso painting of a head near a 16th-century French wood sculpture of the crucified Christ—and those are just two objects among more than two dozen on that wall. The total effect of a single room and certainly of a whole visit could be both confusing and exhilarating. Indeed, one might speak of the Four Stages of the Barnes Experience: Bewilderment, Curiosity, Insight, Appreciation. Whether or not they ultimately "got" the Barnes, all visitors who entered left knowing they had partaken of an art experience of unparalleled richness and intensity. Hence the protracted uproar over the proposed move and earlier rescue plans going back some 20 years. People who know and love the Barnes felt something precious and irreplaceable was in danger of being lost.

The more so because the Barnes's future too often seemed to be hostage to other agendas. For example, it isn't entirely clear if the idea hatched in 2002 to move the Barnes downtown happened because it really was thought to be the only way to save the financially beleaguered institution, or because relocation would help then-Gov. Ed Rendell to realize his dream of turning Benjamin Franklin Parkway into a center of cultural tourism. (Around the same time, the state was also negotiating to establish an Alexander Calder museum on the parkway, an effort that ultimately came to naught.)

Still, there was only one relevant issue once the decision to move was made: Would the result be a Disneyfied simulacrum—the Barnes in quotation marks, as it were? Or would visitors have the same intimate, revelatory encounter with works of art in the new locale as in Merion?

Thanks to the architects, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, who understood from the beginning the delicate nature of their task, the Barnes experience today is identical to what it was previously. They have created a carefully staged entrance, ensuring that the hurly-burly of the everyday world is left behind so the visitor enters the collection in the proper frame of mind to absorb its riches. It's an arrangement that recalls Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with its new entrance pavilion by Renzo Piano, which now houses all the necessary but distracting museum functions such as ticketing and coat check to ensure that once inside the Venetian palazzo you are able to focus exclusively on art and taste.

Inside the Barnes's galleries the architects have made subtle enhancements, such as using a special glass in the windows to admit more daylight than was possible in Dr. Barnes's day, and reflecting artificial light off raised ceilings. The result is the best of both worlds: The works of art are more visible than previously, and yet the installation is so thoroughly and convincingly replicated that there are times you have to remind yourself that you're on the parkway, not in Merion.

Especially welcome is the new temporary-exhibition gallery that will be used for shows exploring Dr. Barnes's life and career in art. The inaugural exhibition, "Ensemble: Albert C. Barnes and the Experiment in Education," uses works of art and archival material to provide visitors with an excellent primer on Dr. Barnes, his collection and his aesthetic formation. There was nothing like this in Merion, and it is certain to go a long way to dispel the aura of strangeness that has long attached to Dr. Barnes, his vision and his method.

Not everything is perfect. The architects have broken the sequence by inserting an interior garden between two sets of lateral galleries at one end, and done the same thing at the other end with a classroom. It's a decision that orphans the outermost rooms, thus diminishing the overall effect of the installation. We also could have done without Ellsworth Kelly's banal geometric sculpture "Barnes Totem" gracing the forecourt. Talk about a downer.

Most perplexing of all, the large, day-lighted central atrium has been named in honor of Walter and Leonora Annenberg. Whatever his virtues as a collector and philanthropist, Annenberg was a longtime foe of Dr. Barnes. If any aspect of this new arrangement is likely to have Dr. Barnes fulminating in his grave, it's the presence of the Annenberg name on this new museum.

Those are, however, details. The fact is that after touring this new facility, you come away convinced that the Barnes Foundation is poised at the beginning of a bright new future—one that will allow its magnificent collection to become better known, Dr. Barnes's ideas to be more widely understood, and the man himself to be recognized as the generous, idealistic visionary he was instead of the eccentric curmudgeon of popular caricature. It's a future that could scarcely be imagined until now, and one that everyone, including those of us critical of the Barnes's stewards in the past, has a stake in seeing come to pass.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal's Leisure & Arts features editor.

Stephen.Bates@gmail.com | +1 202-730-9760 

Not for sale

©Ashley Gilbertson/VII

Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park, New York, in October 2011

 What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Michael Sandel, Allen Lane RRP£20/Farrar, Straus and Giroux RRP$27, 256 pages

How Much is Enough? The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life, by Robert and Edward Skidelsky, Allen Lane RRP£20/Other Press, RRP$24.95, 256 pages

The economic collapse that followed the credit boom has sometimes felt like a marital betrayal. Here was a system, and an economic philosophy to underpin it, that was supposed to make us happy. For a while it did. Now, as financially pumped growth and ever-increasing house prices recede into memory, we realise what fools we were. Like the faithful spouse ignoring the warnings of friends, we wanted to believe in what, with the benefit of hindsight, could not be.

Sadder but wiser, we can now decide between giving the system another chance or leaving it behind in search of a better match. It is a choice that does not map conveniently on to the two main populist forces of the moment: the Tea Party and Occupy movements. Their different political hues, and those of their European equivalents, obscure the same underlying grievance. The Tea Party blames the government; Occupy blames big business. But ask a Tea Party supporter about his Medicare health benefits and he is not as opposed to government as he thinks. Nor can the Occupiers be described as revolutionaries. Their demands – for jobs and for more taxes on the rich and corporations – fall rather short of class warfare. In an op-ed article for this newspaper, Occupy London members quoted Hayek rather than Marx.

Few in either camp offer a radical critique. They agree that people have been cheated of what they deserve, even if they disagree on who deserves what. Their objection to contemporary capitalism is a materialistic one: that it falls short of its promise to create prosperity for all. They want that promise kept, not abandoned.

From that perspective, the main question must be how markets can yield the fairer outcomes we have been led to expect. Some recent studies – Finance and the Good Society by the Yale finance professor Robert Shiller, and Free Market Fairness by John Tomasi, a political philosopher at Brown University, being two notable examples – adopt just this approach. But what if the biggest problem is not capitalism’s failure to deliver on its promise but the promise itself?

In that case, the changes we need go far beyond tweaking economic incentives. Two new books that enter these darker waters and question the axioms of market capitalism are Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy and Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s How Much Is Enough?. Both want us to see our romance with capitalism as a Faustian bargain. The warning is that giving free rein to markets, even if they do deliver the material goods, comes at the cost of giving up a part of our soul.

For Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard, we have “drifted from having a market economy to being a market society” – by which he means that we increasingly treat the important things in life merely as commodities available for purchase and sale. For Robert Skidelsky, the economic historian known for his biography of John Maynard Keynes, and his son Edward, an academic philosopher, the problem is material insatiability. The incessant quest for more – higher incomes, faster growth – is robbing us of the good life rather than helping us attain it. Both books argue that the faith in markets has surreptitiously undermined the things we care, or should care, most about.

Nobody would accuse either Sandel or the Skidelskys of being revolutionaries. They do not condemn capitalism and markets as such. But they are radicals in the true sense of the word: they ask us to rethink our view of markets to the roots. Indeed, they are more cogently radical than most avowed anti-capitalists. Their warning, which is reason enough to read both books, is that our ability – individual and collective – to pursue valuable lives has been undermined because a certain form of political philosophy, and in particular the influence of contemporary economic thinking, has numbed our understanding of what the good life is.

Both books set out their stall by drawing attention to different but equally startling sets of facts – facts that are obvious once you think about them. However, the problem is precisely that we do not think about them anywhere near enough.

The Skidelskys begin with “Keynes’s mistake” – such a clever argumentative springboard that I am surprised it has not, to my knowledge, been used before in this way. This is the Keynes not of the General Theory but of “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”, the 1930 essay that imagined the world liberal capitalism could produce a century hence. Keynes forecast a four- to eight-fold increase in the standard of living, which would put “the economic problem ... within sight of solution”. More concretely, this would mean being able to “satisfy our needs without having to work more than three hours a day. The possibility ... was that we would learn to use our extra leisure to live ‘wisely and agreeably and well’. ”

Keynes was spot-on about per capita economic growth, which averages 400 per cent across rich countries since he made the forecast. For hours worked, he missed the mark completely. People do work less than before, of course, but we are nowhere near swapping the nine-to-five for lives dominated by leisure.

This much is obvious. What is not obvious is why Keynes’ vision of society has not been realised, even though economic conditions now allow for it. As the Skidelskys’ title makes clear, they blame an obsession with growth. But that does not seem quite right. Productivity growth does not itself hinder the good life they advocate, nor policies to make it more attainable. The problem, as the authors admit, is the one lamented by moralists through the ages: seeing acquisitiveness not as a means to the good life but as an end in itself.

Sandel has no quarrel with growth; what worries him is commercialisation. As market norms encroach upon ever more extensive fields of human activity, more and more things are valued as if they were items to be priced. Sandel’s battery of facts is a freak show of commercial transactions that until recently would have been unheard of. For example, audience places to congressional hearings are allocated on a first-come-first-serve basis. But professional line-standing companies will hire someone to queue for you for what can be long hours of waiting overnight and outdoors. For a fee, lobbyists can then arrive shortly before a hearing starts and crowd the public audience seats.

What Money Can’t Buy is replete with examples of what money can, in fact, buy. South Africa allows sales of limited permits to shoot endangered black rhinoceros (which, defenders argue, gives landowners incentives to protect the species). In the viaticals and “life settlement” industries, investors buy the life insurance policies of the sick and elderly in the hope that they will die sooner rather than later. Investment banks are busy bundling such policies into securities known as “death bonds”. Sandel parades before our eyes the corporate-sponsored baseball commentary (“AT&T call to the bullpen”), the ticket tout market for papal masses, and the lady who had a casino’s website tattooed to her forehead for $10,000.

Coming from a lesser thinker or weaker writer, this would sound like an old man’s complaints that things are not the way they used to be. But Sandel has a genius for showing why such changes are deeply important – and why economists are wrong to be irritated by what they see as irrational opposition to market solutions.

Take the good of friendship, he offers. Suppose you are feeling lonely but you have money to spare. Why not pay for company? The answer, of course, is that while you can pay someone to do the things friends often do – come over for dinner, take care of the cat, listen to your love problems – that would not make the person your friend. On the contrary, doing such things in order to be paid is incompatible with being a friend. If it is bought, it is not friendship.

In the case of friendship, we can all see that the commercialisation of a relationship turns it into something else. Sandel’s point is that this may be true of many other things we value. Treating something as a good to be bought and sold for a price can corrupt its non-commercial meaning. A proposal by the law and economics scholar Richard Posner to let adoptive parents bid for the most popular adoptees (which was not implemented) would have demeaned the proper way of valuing children, as persons worthy of love and care. A plan to let people pay to jump the queue for the free tickets to New York’s Shakespeare in the Park (which was) degraded the event’s former meaning as a gift from the city to itself.

One may agree or disagree, depending on the case. What is striking, and what the Skidelskys also show, is how tone-deaf conventional economic thinking often is to reflections about value. No doubt this derives from the authors’ own experience with economists imperialistically wielding their method of social analysis and intellectually bamboozling policymakers.

Two questions remain unanswered, and they are huge. What to do? And what to do now – when people smarting from austerity can be forgiven for not seeing too much materialism as their main problem?

The Skidelskys make proposals whose lack of originality is no flaw. They advocate a universal basic income, consumption taxes and restraints on advertising. These are sensible enough policy ideas. But they seem inadequate as a response to “Keynes’s mistake”. After all, current policies do not hinder many of us from working less, contenting ourselves with “enough” and cultivating the good life. The problem is surely at least as much with our own attitudes as with public policy.

Sandel’s approach is more promising for being more modest. He calls merely for a willingness to discuss how we ought to value things. This is subtly different (though he may disagree) from choosing policies based on an idea of the good life. The dominant political and economic thinking may well now tell us that policy should not push any specific conception of how people ought to live their lives, only respect individuals’ rights and preferences. But that still leaves people free – indeed, it requires them – to exercise value judgments about what sort of life is most worth living. If they choose lives that seem morally impoverished, this is a problem that must be addressed through deliberation and education as much as by policy.

This is the best spirit in which to read these two books. It is also one that is less confrontational with respect to economics. I am not as convinced as these authors seem to be that market thinking is an enemy of value. Good economists seek to respect the values of individuals. They can be made to realise, and correct, some of the unwarranted implicit value judgments economic models often make. No doubt both Sandel and the Skidelskys are right that free-market economics has fallen short in realising what we truly value. But that is not a task from which economics should be excluded, but rather one in which we should enlist its help the better to achieve.

Martin Sandbu is the FT’s economics leader writer and author of ‘Just Business: Arguments in Business Ethics’ (Prentice Hall)

Rich Karlgaard: The Future Is More Than Facebook

By RICH KARLGAARD

In March 1986, Microsoft ended its first day as a public company with a market capitalization of $780 million. Its value grew more than 700 times that over the next 13 years and made Bill Gates, in 1999, the richest man ever with a net worth of $101 billion. When Facebook goes public this Friday its market cap could easily hit $100 billion, bringing founder Mark Zuckerberg's net worth to more than $18 billion. That's about 50 times what Mr. Gates was worth after Microsoft's IPO.

Facebook's big payday should be cause for celebration in a liberal democracy. Instead it has provoked two kinds of anxiety. Both imply America's best days are over.

The first is that America's innovation engine, Silicon Valley, is again overheating. Evidence: Last month Facebook swapped $1 billion in pre-IPO shares and some cash for Instagram, a two-year-old start-up with 11 employees and no revenue. A week later, another Silicon Valley start-up called Splunk, slyly allied with the decades's two hottest buzz generators—cloud computing and big data—went public at a $1.5 billion value on just $121 million in sales this year. Yet shareholders swooned for Splunk and bid up its $17 IPO share price to $37 in the first two days of trading.

This has to be a bubble, right?

The second worry is that only a certain kind of company is getting rich in the Obama economy. These are outfits that make algorithms—bits of software code cleverly strung together to take the form of an iPhone operating system, a LinkedIn social network, or a proprietary trading scheme.

The modern-day code rockers are not mere nerds, either. They form an Algorithmic Army of slightly surreal folks like, well, Mr. Zuckerberg. They seem to be pale men with oddly flat voices and faraway gazes who prefer to hide out in the bathroom during the IPO roadshow. When finally coaxed onto the stage to face investors, the great Zuckerberg appeared in a hoodie.

That can't be America's future, can it?

The debate about whether America will own the global economy in the 21st century or else become a dude ranch for rich Chinese and Brazilians hinges on whether innovation can break out of the box. Can it go mainstream and transform the really big things: transportation, energy, electricity, food production, water delivery, health care and education?

Bloomberg

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg

If it can't do that—or if it is thwarted by high taxes and complex regulation—then welcome to the new normal of 2% annual growth. Our future will become sadly familiar. Just follow Spain, France and Great Britain down history's sinkhole of lost status and influence.

But America can do better than that, and it will. In fact, the seeds are being planted now. In Silicon Valley, investing in social-media companies is already passé. Last year, as private investors were bidding up Facebook's valuation to $100 billion, the veteran Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee said "the next 500 social-media companies will lose money." He's broadly right. The time to make big returns in Facebook and in social media has passed.

There's a growing interest among bright minds to apply "exponential technologies" (the phrase used by Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, founders of Singularity University) to solve problems much larger than whom to friend on Facebook. Transportation is one of those big deals. Would you rather own a car, an iPad or a Facebook membership? Thought so. By 2050 the planet will have nine billion inhabitants and three billion cars. This will create huge demand for fuel and road access.

Silicon Valley's biggest new thing, therefore, is not Instagram or Splunk but Google's robot-driven car. The Google car is only four years old. In 2008, it could barely get around pylons in a parking lot. Last year it got down San Francisco's snaky Lombard Street with no human driver and today it races over mountain passes with only R2-D2's second cousin behind the wheel. This rate of progress is normal in the algorithmic world, but it is new in the physical world.

Manufacturing? America will own the mid-21st century. Geopolitical instability and rising oil prices will wreck the late 20th-century rationale for outsourcing. Chinese labor costs are rising 20% a year while robotic costs are dropping by 30% a year. Do the math.

"Made in the USA" is set to have a major comeback. The showstopper will be 3-D printing, which makes physical objects from a digital file. It will turn our artists into artisanal manufacturers and reward American-style creativity.

Energy? America's natural-gas and shale oil boom will bridge us to 2030 or so when solar energy and algae-based fuels will be closer to market parity and begin to make a real contribution. As long as I'm on the topic of the natural-gas boom, what key technology made this happy surprise possible? High-tech horizontal drilling. Who knew? We were all too busy fiddling with our iPhone apps to see it coming.

Question: If America could have only one of the following—Facebook, Twitter or horizontal drilling—which would be the smarter choice?

Happily, we don't have to make that choice. America remains the world's innovator, a country without limits.

Mr. Karlgaard is publisher of Forbes.