I am not sure how much control "The Market" has over higher education and it would seem that most business leaders find the present quantity of college graduates, sufficiently prepared, rather wanting, especially in math and science which have traditionally allowed the U.S. to be the top innovator in all areas of R&D, invention, and final consumer products and financial instruments.
Not to judge George Soros but I suspect hard "moral" decisions become easier as one becomes wealthier, especially when one can choose to (or not to) go to work every day or associate with undesirable riff-raff. Virtue can still be problematic, given one possesses it.
As for the search for morality in the market, I would suggest this is not the right place for such a quest. To quote Elton John it's like: "looking for Gold in a Silver mine or-- whiskey in a bottle of wine". Economic markets are, and should be, devoid of the emotional concepts of fairness, morality, or virtue. They are merely a venue for human economic intercourse where goods and services are exchanged given an agreement between two or more entities. There is a "fairness" to the market but this fairness extends only to the point of determining price at a given instant in time for a particular good or service between two parties and does not consider individuals' particular wants or needs. The final price, of a particular good or service, is that at which the buyer is willing to buy AND the seller is willing to sell a particular point in time--and no more.
As for:
Quote:"Collective values must be safe guarded by collective political and civic actions and institutions. The amorality of the markets makes it essential that social values find expression in the rules that govern financial markets"
This recognizes the above point of amorality but then resorts to what first appears as liberal or progressive hand wringing about how we should inject morality into the market place. I understand this feeling but asking "civic actions and institutions" means legislative action which then calls upon political forces that may or may not do any good, at best. The latest example of this is the Congressional overreaction to the Enron debacle-- the Sarbanes-Oxley act that has increased corporate administrative regulations to the point where many companies have decided not to list (on stock exchanges) in the U.S. Remembering the Congressional and Presidential reaction to the Terry Schaivo case instructs us to be careful what we ask for from our civic institutions.
JM
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