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

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.

The Vocabulary I Needed

Michael Sandel articulates the moral discomfort I have had for decades, but didn’t have the language to express intelligibly. I thank him and recommend this book.

Challenging

I typically think of myself as a right winger on fiscal issues. Taxes and government should as small as possible etc. I am surprised therefore to find myself really liking this book. I read it because I was so impressed with his other book (justice) I felt I needed to follow it up. I'm glad I did. I'm still probably a right winger but my thinking now comes with some caveat and nuance.

Connect your own dots. Well done.

This is a rather timely book. Professor Sandel does a great job of laying out the ethical, moral and economic arguments, but requires the reader, at least until the very end, to connect the dots and decide what is right. I really appreciate this because it allows one to draw one's own moral conclusions and do some of the work required to decide what is right and wrong about the way markets have shaped society. This has the potential to turn readers from passive head-nodders to active participants in change. One minor knit-pick: as an advertising person, I feel that calling into question the morality of certain kinds of adverting (casino tattoos on the forehead, turning one's home or car into a billboard) somewhat cheapens the arguments in this book. Advertising takes many forms and it's really easy (and a little lazy) to point to the more out-there forms of the trade and call it into question. Yes, it's morally wrong to prey on the economic situations of people that need to get tattoos or car wraps in order to feed their families, fund their drug habits or pay their mortgages. We all know this. The thing about advertising is, it's a self-policing business. If the general public feels that a specific form of advertising is repugnant, it goes away pretty quickly for the simple reason that a message in that media will be met with disdain instead of sales. That said, I found this book, as I have with other books by the author, completely engrossing, thought-provoking and stimulating.

Great introduction to the world of ethics

Well written and read by one of Harvard's most engaging professors, this book is a great introduction to ethical ideas and their application to everyday questions. Sandel is well known for his Harvard lecture series 'Justice' which is freely available on the web. He has a knack for using examples, both common and obscure, to illustrate ethical principles and decision-making processes that help learners better understand how ethical decisions can be reached.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book and it made me stop and think about ideas that had never occured to me in relation to commercialism, insurance, advertising and inequality.

Strongly recommended.

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.