What Money Can't Buy

The Moral Limits of Markets

By: Michael J. Sandel

Narrated by: Michael J. Sandel

Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's summary

Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we allow corporations to pay for the right to pollute the atmosphere? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars? Auctioning admission to elite universities? Selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In What Money Can’t Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes on one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Is there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don’t belong? What are the moral limits of markets? In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?

In his New York Times best seller Justice, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can’t Buy, he provokes an essential discussion that we, in our marketdriven age, need to have: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society—and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets don’t honor and that money can’t buy?

©2012 Michael J. Sandel (P)2012 Macmillan Audio

Must read for modern discourse

Thoughtful and important deconstruction of economic theory and practice in modern society, when viewed from a moral philosophy perspective. Michael J. Sandel deftly brings the reader through the morass of several contentious and important social issues. I recommend this book for anyone.

Thoughtful and well fit to society challenges debates

Very thoughtful book by Sandel that brings the rights questions to the table, including “do we want to create markets for everything?”
Last chapter is the weakest of the book though. Could have brought a more economical rather than purely moral point of view.
Recommended to public policy professionals and activists of many fronts.

the skyboxification of our lives

Super survey of all the different ways we monetize our lives. A section on how companies purchase life insurance on hundreds of thousands of employees was especially interesting, as was a discussion on the business of "naming rights."

Extremely interesting and insightful

Sandel is an master philosopher able to apply his thinking to actual ethical issues--a very rare skill for philosophers. This book is very well-reasoned and raised my awareness about a lot of moral issues I hadn't given much thought to before. He has some clear value preferences, but I don't think you need to share them to get a lot out of this book. There's no denying that I entered favorably inclined toward his conclusions, but he really sharpened my thinking on a lot of points where my reasoning had been weak. I suspect if you are strongly libertarian and don't share his value judgments, you'll disagree with his conclusions. Nevertheless, i think this book will help you better articulate on what key value judgments underlie your own policy preferences and why you hold them.

Note also that this book is FAR from anti-markets. It would be a mistake to dismiss it as another book by a Harvard professor trashing free-markets. He's not dealing AT ALL with standard economic policy issues (tax cuts, government regulation of business, etc.). He's really only dealing with ways that market-thinking has spilled beyond those realms into zone of life where we might not expect it too. To illustrate, I think Mitt Romney could well read this book and agree with almost all of it.

A Fantastically Practical Read!

Sandel does a wonderful job bringing to light some of the moral compromises we have made with regard to market-driven initiatives in the last three decades. This book is a wonderful invitation to rethink our moral and civic boundaries (or create purposeful boundaries where they have been entirely eroded).

Nicely done

Good information, presented in a very easy to listen to style, well worth the time.
I enjoyed this book much

Great concepts, but too long

Although I enjoyed listening to this book, I feel as though it repeating many of the same points and exact examples too many times. Also, it lost me with the long chapter about baseball and sports at the end. Overall very interesting, exploring the morality of the ever expanding marketization of our economy.

Book highlights market intrusions in public space

Sandel articulates the intrusions of market values in public spaces and how that intrusion degrades our coherence as a society and our personal values. His analysis is spot on.

Loved it

I first found Michael Sandel from his lecture called Justice. I needed to hear more. He has a very calming voice and is very intelligent. This book titled What Money Can’t Buy, posed many interesting questions and also provided me with a lesson on some of the most shocking things that can be bought. I highly recommend this book.

“The skyboxification of American life”

I love how this guy thinks and the fact that it sounds like he’s got a couple of morals running around in his head. The most important point he makes is that the market does not honor anything but itself. But this is the trend in America—everything for sale. That’s capitalism!

If everything is for sale, then nothing is sacred.

Money corrupts.

I know. It’s nothing new.