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WHAT MONEY CANT BUY: The Moral Limits of Markets Paperback – 2 April 2013
by MICHAEL J. SANDEL (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 1,719 ratings
In What Money Can't Buy, renowned political philosopher Michael J. Sandel rethinks the role that markets and money should play in our society.
Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a price on human life to decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay?
In his New York Times bestseller What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't 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?
Over recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.
In Justice, an international bestseller, 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 a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?
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"Michael Sandel's What Money Can't Buy is a great book and I recommend every economist to read it, even though we are not really his target audience. The book is pitched at a much wider audience of concerned citizens. But it taps into a rich seam of discontent about the discipline of economics.... The book is brimming with interesting examples which make you think.... I read this book cover-to-cover in less than 48 hours. And I have written more marginal notes than for any book I have read in a long time." --Timothy Besley, Journal of Economic Literature
"Provocative. . . What Money Can't Buy [is] an engaging, compelling read, consistently unsettling and occasionally unnerving. . . [It] deserves a wide readership." --David M. Kennedy, Democracy
"Brilliant, easily readable, beautifully delivered and often funny. . . an indispensable book on the relationship between morality and economics." --David Aaronovitch, The Times (London)
"Sandel is probably the world's most relevant living philosopher." --Michael Fitzgerald, Newsweek
"In a culture mesmerized by the market, Sandel's is the indispensable voice of reason.... What Money Can't Buy. . . must surely be one of the most important exercises in public philosophy in many years." --John Gray, New Statesman
"[An] important book. . . Michael Sandel is just the right person to get to the bottom of the tangle of moral damage that is being done by markets to our values." --Jeremy Waldron, The New York Review of Books
"The most famous teacher of philosophy in the world, [has] shown that it is possible to take philosophy into the public square without insulting the public's intelligence. . .[He] is trying to force open a space for a discourse on civic virtue that he believes has been abandoned by both left and right." --Michael Ignatieff, The New Republic
"[Sandel]is such a gentle critic that he merely asks us to open our eyes. . . Yet What Money Can't Buy makes it clear that market morality is an exceptionally thin wedge. . . Sandel is pointing out. . . [a] quite profound change in society." --Jonathan V. Last, The Wall Street Journal
"What Money Can't Buy is the work of a truly public philosopher. . . [It] recalls John Kenneth Galbraith's influential 1958 book, The Affluent Society. . .Galbraith lamented the impoverishment of the public square. Sandel worries about its abandonment--or, more precisely, its desertion by the more fortunate and capable among us. . .[A]n engaging, compelling read, consistently unsettling. . . it reminds us how easy it is to slip into a purely material calculus about the meaning of life and the means we adopt in pursuit of happiness." --David M. Kennedy, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
"[Sandel] is currently the most effective communicator of ideas in English." --The Guardian
"Michael Sandel is probably the most popular political philosopher of his generation. . .The attention Sandel enjoys is more akin to a stadium-filling self-help guru than a philosopher. But rather than instructing his audiences to maximize earning power or balance their chakras, he challenges them to address fundamental questions about how society is organized. . . His new book [What Money Can't Buy] offers an eloquent argument for morality in public life." --Andrew Anthony, The Observer (London)
"What Money Can't Buy is replete with examples of what money can, in fact, buy. . . Sandel has a genius for showing why such changes are deeply important." --Martin Sandbu, Financial Times
"One of the leading political thinkers of our time.... Sandel's new book is What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, and I recommend it highly. It's a powerful indictment of the market society we have become, where virtually everything has a price." --Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
"To understand the importance of [Sandel's] purpose, you first have to grasp the full extent of the triumph achieved by market thinking in economics, and the extent to which that thinking has spread to other domains. This school sees economics as a discipline that has nothing to do with morality, and is instead the study of incentives, considered in an ethical vacuum. Sandel's book is, in its calm way, an all-out assault on that idea.... Let's hope that What Money Can't Buy, by being so patient and so accumulative in its argument and its examples, marks a permanent shift in these debates." --John Lancaster, The Guardian
"Sandel is among the leading public intellectuals of the age. He writes clearly and concisely in prose that neither oversimplifies nor obfuscates.... Sandel asks the crucial question of our time: 'Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?'" --Douglas Bell, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
"Deeply provocative and intellectually suggestive.... What Sandel does...is to prod us into asking whether we have any reason for drawing a line between what is and what isn't exchangeable, what can't be reduced to commodity terms.... [A] wake-up call to recognize our desperate need to rediscover some intelligible way of talking about humanity." --Rowan Williams, Prospect
"There is no more fundamental question we face than how to best preserve the common good and build strong communities that benefit everyone. Sandel's book is an excellent starting place for that dialogue." --Kevin J. Hamilton, The Seattle Times
"Poring through Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel's new book. . . I found myself over and over again turning pages and saying, 'I had no idea.' I had no idea that in the year 2000, 'a Russian rocket emblazoned with a giant Pizza Hut logo carried advertising into outer space.'. . . I knew that stadiums are now named for corporations, but had no idea that now 'even sliding into home is a corporate-sponsored event.'. . . I had no idea that in 2001 an elementary school in New Jersey became America's first public school 'to sell naming rights to a corporate sponsor.' Why worry about this trend? Because, Sandel argues, market values are crowding out civic practices." --Thomas Friedman, New York Times
"An exquisitely reasoned, skillfully written treatise on big issues of everyday life." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"In his new book, Michael Sandel --the closest the world of political philosophy comes to a celebrity -- argues that we now live in a society where 'almost everything can be bought and sold.' As markets have infiltrated more parts of life, Sandel believes we have shifted from a market economy to 'a market society, ' turning the world -- and most of us in it -- into commodities. And when Sandel proselytizes, the world listens.... Sandel's ideas could hardly be more timely." --Rosamund Urwin, Evening Standard (London)
About the Author
Michael J. Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard University. His books What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets and Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? were international best sellers and have been translated into 27 languages. Sandel's legendary course "Justice" was the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and has been viewed by tens of millions. His BBC series "The Public Philosopher" explores the philosophical ideas lying behind the headlines with participants from around the world.
Product details
Publisher : MACMILLAN USA; Reprint edition (2 April 2013)
Language : English
Paperback : 256 pages
ISBN-10 : 0374533652
ISBN-13 : 978-0374533656
Dimensions : 13.84 x 1.65 x 20.83 cmBest Sellers Rank: 455,440 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)80 in Exports & Imports (Books)
359 in Philosophy of Good & Evil
914 in Business Ethics (Books)Customer Reviews:
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 1,719 ratings
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Michael J. Sandel
Michael Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard University. He has been described as a “rock-star moralist” (Newsweek) and “the world’s most influential living philosopher.” (New Statesman) Sandel’s books--on justice, ethics, democracy, and markets--have been translated into more than 30 languages. His legendary course “Justice” was the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and has been viewed by tens of millions. His BBC series “The Global Philosopher” explores the ethical issues lying behind the headlines with participants from around the world.
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Top reviews from Australia
Tom
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent bookReviewed in Australia on 23 December 2019
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Excellent book. A must read for everyone.
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Ray Fun Godfrey-Yik
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting readReviewed in Australia on 8 March 2017
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Michael does an excellent job of summarising the implications of commercialisation from theoretical concepts of fairness, coercion and corruption and provides concrete examples of them in everyday life (e.g. Skyboxes that seperate the rich from the poor)
The book is interesting in that it rarely delves too deeply into the theoretical, and instead provides examples of the moral implications of markets every day - whether it's watching the first class jump the line on a flight, advertising populating the door of a bathroom cubicle, or watching the ongoing debate on immigration. Well worth a read if you're looking to have a better lens to view clashes between economic rationalism and idealism.
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From Australia
Tom
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book
Reviewed in Australia on 23 December 2019
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Excellent book. A must read for everyone.
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Ray Fun Godfrey-Yik
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read
Reviewed in Australia on 8 March 2017
Verified Purchase
Michael does an excellent job of summarising the implications of commercialisation from theoretical concepts of fairness, coercion and corruption and provides concrete examples of them in everyday life (e.g. Skyboxes that seperate the rich from the poor)
The book is interesting in that it rarely delves too deeply into the theoretical, and instead provides examples of the moral implications of markets every day - whether it's watching the first class jump the line on a flight, advertising populating the door of a bathroom cubicle, or watching the ongoing debate on immigration. Well worth a read if you're looking to have a better lens to view clashes between economic rationalism and idealism.
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Adilson Rodrigues Pires
5.0 out of 5 stars To what extent can ethics and morals limit profits?
Reviewed in Brazil on 4 October 2021
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I haven't reached the half of the book yet, but I like the situations that the author poses about the various ways of attracting money, with or without concern for ethics. Today we live in the world of competition and the vision given in the book is very good.
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Alabama53
5.0 out of 5 stars It's worth reading
Reviewed in Germany on 26 October 2014
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A really worth reading book that makes me feel like more from the author. Classical economic theory assumes that commodification, the becoming commodities of a good by offering it for sale, does not alter the properties of the good .
Marketing is merely increasing economic efficiency. The author refutes this assumption.
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Eduardo
5.0 out of 5 stars Philosophical analysis in simple language
Reviewed in Mexico on 5 May 2017
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The author has the ability to take deep subjects and explain them in a clear and pleasant way. Recommended for those who like the in-depth approach to this topic.
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CP
5.0 out of 5 stars Values and moral principles vs market efficiency
Reviewed in Canada on 5 December 2020
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The author, Michael Sandel, has taught and written about values and moral principles throughout his Harvard career. This book covers some subjects (e.g life insurance, health care) where market efficiency may conflict with societal values in some circumstances, which the author explores. One example: The author asks if paying kids for reading books may not induce the wrong attitude towards reading (linking book reading to a market transaction, as opposed to a way to knowledge). The book is more an exploration of various questions involving market mechanisms and societal values, rather than a formal theory of the potential flaws of a market approach.
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A. E. Rountree
5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding
Reviewed in France on 4 June 2017
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Professor Sandel is on the mark and just in time with this pithy assessment of the encroachment of money motives in our daily lives. His thinking is refreshingly clear and direct, as is his writing.
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Ajay Sojitra
5.0 out of 5 stars Masterpiece exploring conflict between Markets and Morals
Reviewed in India on 3 July 2020
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Must read to understand the existing confilcts betweeen morality and markets. And also how in past the market, in almost all the cases, has been able to modify the morals to its own will.
The Author sites all the possible examples to make home the point that eventhough most economists consider good unaffected by the markets, but in reality the market corrupt the goods and the values to make its way in hetherto unpaved areas.
And a debate is necessary to what extent we are willing to give way to market to modify the morals.
As always Micheal Sandale will not disappoint you. Best book which exploree this conflict.
Just go for it. You will know that Micheal Sandale is famous for all the right reasons.
Truely "A Rockstar" in Western Philosophy.
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Cliente Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars My Book of the Year
Reviewed in Spain on 18 December 2017
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As always, it's a pleasure to read Michel Sandel. An easy-to-read book with solid arguments and clear examples.
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Book Review: What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
September 14, 2012 • Commentary
By Tom G. Palmer
This article appeared in Reason on September 14, 2012.
TOP
What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
By Michael F. Sandel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, $27.00 256 pages
Michael Sandel knows something about money. After all, the Harvard political philosopher exchanges his ideas for money—a lot of money, in fact. Now Sandel has written a book (available for $27) about what things should not be for sale.
Sandel’s basic warning goes like this: Markets—by which he means the use of prices expressed in money—lead inevitably to commodification, which “corrupts” and “crowds out” the moral norms that should otherwise guide our interactions. In What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Sandel looks upon other people’s purchases and frowns. Important things in life—tickets to rock concerts, private medical consultations, access to shorter airline check-in lines—are being exchanged for money, he reports. “The reach of markets, and market-oriented thinking, into aspects of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms is one of the most significant developments of our time,” he writes, necessitating “a public debate about what it means to keepmarkets in their place.”
Although Sandel is fuzzy on the specifics, he wants an enlightened debate to determine whether other people should be allowed to use prices when they cooperate or allocate scarce goods. “Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life” he writes. “And so, in the end, the question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together.” Let’s see where that takes us.
What Sandel offers as a moral/philosophical analysis of this alleged problem amounts to little more than an exploration of his own moral intuitions, unencumbered by critical self-scrutiny. Thus, “Treating religious rituals, or natural wonders, as marketable commodities is a failure of respect. Turning sacred goods into instruments of profit values them in the wrong way.” This flat assertion may come as news to much of organized religion.
Synagogues regularly sell seats for the Days of Awe, or High Holy Days, which helps finance religious activities. One of my great aunts, a conservative French Catholic, sent me cards when I was a boy that said she had given money to an order of nuns to pray for me. Sikhs pay for scholars to read from their holy book. The candles one lights in Catholic cathedrals when saying a prayer are priced (not given away free); guests at traditional Polish weddings pin paper money on the dress of the bride in exchange for a dance. Do these practices show a lack of respect for religion and the sacrament of marriage? Should the collective “we” (Sandel uses the term a great deal in all of his books) prohibit the use of money to allocate synagogue seats, prayers, holy readings, candles, and dances with the bride? Or should those decisions be made by members of the respective synagogues, churches, and temples?
Sandel never once in his book entertains the idea that maybe we should let people sort such matters out for themselves, without having the decision made for them by “us.” Instead, his own tastes are presented as suitable for everyone else. There’s a serious danger with such intuitive collectivism: It disguises restatements of one’s own unacknowledged and unexamined prejudices as a philosophical investigation and then imposes them on everyone else.
For Sandei, not deciding collectively on “competing conceptions of the good life” does not leave such questions undecided. Instead, “It simply means that markets will decide them for us” This statement is both ominous and incoherent. “Markets” are not some kind of omnipotent, singular, malevolent intelligence. When people exchange goods and services we use the term market. When the exchanges take place through the medium of money, the exchange ratios of goods against money are called prices. Sandel confuses prices with markets and then suggests that the question of whether something should be exchanged on markets will be “decided” by markets, which is a singular bit of confusion.
Sandel at least recognizes that a common alternative to pricing is waiting in line. But bizarrely, he seems rather fond of queues. He devotes a chapter to “Jumping the Queue,” with subsections on “Markets Versus Queues” and “The Ethic of the Queue,” and quotes approvingly a writer who moans that “gone are the days when the theme-park queue was the great equalizer, where every vacationing family waited its turn in democratic fashion.” Sandel claims there are two arguments favoring prices over queues: “a libertarian argument… that people should be free to buy and sell whatever they please, as long as they don’t violate anyone’s rights,” and a utilitarian economic argument. He then proceeds to ignore the libertarian argument while misunderstanding the economic.
Sandel acknowledges that “as markets allocate goods based on the ability and willingness to pay, queues allocate goods based on the ability and willingness to wait.” Moreover, “there is no reason to assume that the willingness to pay for a good is a better measure of its value to a person than the willingness to wait.” Sandel thinks he has scored a fatal blow against the economic case for markets here, but what he doesn’t get is that the price mechanism provides a decentralized system of signals and incentives that help us to better coordinate our behavior. Consider that a longer queue without prices sends no signal to producers to make more of the product for which people are queuing. Using prices, rather than queues, has the advantage of disseminating information about supply and demand. Sandel sees no coordinating advantages to price allocation and bemoans “the tendency of markets to displace queues and other nonmarket ways of allocating goods.” He describes substitution of prices for queues as “places that markets have invaded.”
Sandel is right that the use of prices can have disadvantages, which is the core insight of Ronald Coase’s theory of the firm. If market pricing is so great, why are there firms? Because using the price system has costs. Firms, teams, and organizations are islands of nonprice allocation and coordination in a wider sea of price allocation. Price coordination co-exists with nonprice coordination. The issue is not which system will award scarce goods to those who value them the most but which will coordinate behavior better in which situations. Sometimes it’s queues and sometimes it’s prices, and sometimes it’s both. (I’m in a Starbucks now, and the system here is first come, first served, probably because it would be too costly to have an auction on who gets served first. Still, the coffee is exchanged for money).
Bakers of communion wafers generally sell them to churches for money. The churches provide them as part of a sacrament for which the faithful queue. Whether to use prices or queues and at which point is really none of Sandel’s business.
Sandel is not only rhapsodic about queues but again invokes the collective we when he states: “Of course, markets and queues are not the only ways of allocating things. Some goods we distribute by merit, others by need, still others by lottery or chance.” He’s not just pro-queue but rather strongly against prices, which seem to him somehow dirty (“corrosive”) as a coordinating mechanism. Never addressed is whether some of “us” should be allowed to work out for ourselves our own solutions, without having one imposed on all. Sandel explains that some things “can’t be bought,” e.g., friendship. Aristotle may beg to differ; the Greek philosopher discussed “friendship for advantage” in Book 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics, declaring it one kind of friendship, though not the highest. Still, we may insult friends when we reward a favor with money; sometimes “the monetary exchange spoils the good being bought.” That sounds right to me, if not all that original or deep.
Still, Sandel doesn’t seem to have thought very hard about these things. His research skills have discovered that there is “a company in China” that you can pay to write an apology, and that at ThePerfectToast.com you can purchase a prefab wedding toast. “Apologies and wedding toasts are goods that can, in a sense, be bought,” he writes. “But buying and selling them changes their character and diminishes their value.” Perhaps. But so what? Drug store companies have been selling syrupy Hallmark cards for decades. I don’t use them. Like Sandel, I speak and write for a living. Unlike Sandel, I understand that not everyone else does. Among the many items Sandel believes are “degraded” when exchanged for money are human kidneys. Of course, allowing people to offer money for voluntarily donated kidneys may save lives (or “ease the gap between supply and demand” as Sandel delicately puts it), but it “taints” the goods exchanged. Making it illegal to exchange kidneys for money may be costing thousands of people their lives, but, hey, it satisfies our-which is to say, Professor Sandel’s–desire to avoid tackiness.
In a book full of praise for the moral virtues of nonmonetary exchanges, there is only one concession to the advantages of markets: “As the cold war ended, markets and market thinking enjoyed unrivaled prestige, understandably so,” Sandel graciously concedes. “No other mechanism for organizing the production and distribution of goods had proved as successful at generating affluence and prosperity.”
It’s something, but it ain’t much. In contrast, nonmarket norms, such as queuing, subsistence hunting, need, chance, and honor (mostly unaccompanied by any specific mechanisms of allocation), are consistently praised as “higher.” That’s a remarkably obtuse approach. There is a long tradition of thinkers, from Montesquieu and Voltaire to Milton Friedman and Deirdre McCloskey, that has focused attention on the moral virtues of markets, not merely their ability to produce wealth.
Sandel is surrounded by market exchanges that enhance his life, but all he can see is corruption, corrosion, and degradation. Never is the price system praised for displacing an inferior moral norm. It seems that whatever form of interaction is displaced by a price system must be better, higher, nobler. Au contraire! Markets punish and eventually push out tribalism, confessionalism, racism, cronyism, and many other traditions. And good riddance.
It’s not as if this point has never been made. “Commerce is a cure for the most destructive prejudices; for it is almost a general rule, that wherever we find agreeable manners, there commerce flourishes,” Montesquieu wrote in 1748, ”and that wherever there is commerce, there we meet with agreeable manners.” Sandel never acknowledges that intellectual tradition.
As Milton Friedman (who Sandel dismisses without engaging) once noted, “no one who buys bread knows whether the wheat from which it is made was grown by a Communist or a Republican, by a constitutionalist or a Fascist, or, for that matter, by a Negro or a white. This illustrates how an impersonal market separates economic activities from political views and protects men from being discriminated against in their economic activities for reasons that are irrelevant to their productivity—whether these reasons are associated with their views or their color.”
Prices, contra Sandel, “corrode” many nonmarket norms that we are better off without. Markets promote color blindness, punctuality, mutual respect, the “double thank you” of voluntary exchanges, and peace. Somehow those virtues don’t make it into Sandel’s musings on the moral limits of markets. What Money Can’t Buy will titillate with its examples of odd things some people buy and sell. But it fails to provide moral guidance to how we should behave (other than not fooling ourselves by thinking we can buy true friendship), and it gives even less insight into the roles that prices and markets play in our lives.
About the Author
Media Name: palmer-cropped.jpg
Tom G. Palmer
Executive Vice President for International Programs, Atlas Network; Director, Cato University; and Senior Fellow, Cato Institute
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Book Review: What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael Sandel
4 comments | 29 shares
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2012/06/15/what-money-cant-buy-the-moral-limits-of-markets/
In What Money Can’t Buy, Sandel examines one of the biggest ethical questions of our time and provokes a debate that’s been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honour and money cannot buy? Gil Shidlo feels that Sandel brings the issue to be debated and raises it in a way each one of us feels fully equipped to voice concerns.
What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Michael Sandel. Allen Lane. May 2012.
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Yet again, Michael Sandel, one of the most relevant philosophers of our times, forces us to take a closer look at moral aspects of our lives. Following the success of his previous book Justice, What Money Can’t Buy pushes us to re-examine attitudes, values and norms which govern social and civic life.
Though many of us seem troubled by commodification of certain aspects of social and civic life, most of us tend to accept it in order to avoid a public debate. Like many relevant philosophers before him, Michael Sandel, a professor of politics at Harvard, is trying very hard to reform us and turn us from mere acquiescent individuals into full participants in the shaping of social and civic life. He pushes us to voice our concerns and debate them without deflecting from the importance of morality in the choices we make.
What Money Can’t Buy looks closely at the moral implications for a society where virtually everything is for sale and where market economy is used to allocate everything from health to education to public safety and criminal justice. Michael Sandel gives examples from various US states: in California a non-violent offender can pay for a prison cell upgrade; in other states single drivers can pay for use of car pool lanes; 24/7 access to your doctor can be bought for $1500 a year and above; admission of your child to a top US university; fast track at airport security; paying for people to stand in line for you to attend a Congressional hearing.
The problem is compounded further when markets are no longer inert. What commodification does is create a greater inequality and stronger possibility of corruption by not only putting price on goods but also altering attitudes towards certain type of goods. The book suggests that if markets in social goods are no longer inert, some of the good things in life are corrupted and we have debased their moral value and by it endangered the existence of orderly society. This, in turn, raises the need to look closely at these goods and try to find different ways to value them without stripping them of their moral or political value.
The debate raised by this book is forcing us to recognize that civic duty may not be treated as private property and as such cannot be given monetary value. Where commodification takes place it is highly likely to create greater inequality and corruption and this in turn jeopardizes the existence of orderly society.
Sandel describes new ways of making money if you cannot afford the services mentioned in the book. One can rent space on one’s body to advertise; or serve as a human guinea pig for a big pharmaceutical company; or work for a line-standing company for those lacking in time but wishing to attend a free concert or hear the Pope. Even young children get paid nowadays – second grade children in Texas schools get paid $2 to read a book; obese people are paid to lose weight in a targeted time frame. One can even try and profit by buying the life insurance policy of an elderly person. In this case, we would pay the premium while the person is alive and collect the death benefit. While the objective of a life insurance was to help the family survivors in this case the investor profits more if a person dies sooner. Thus, life insurance is an example of how market values can change the character of an industry. Michael Sandel writes how Walmart (the largest retail company in the world) took this concept one step forward. It insured the lives of hundreds of thousands of its employees and every time one of them died Walmart benefited from it rather than the family of the deceased.
It seems there is hardly any service or good which one cannot buy in this new market society. The list of what money cannot buy is rather short – for example friendship; a Noble Prize or an Olympic Prize (although some medals have been sold the honor of being awarded the prize cannot be sold).
But the fact that we acquiesce to these new practices where everything may be monetarily quantified is seriously questioned in this book. There are some critics who think the book does not go far enough by adopting a more prescriptive approach. In my view, Sandel fully fulfills what any scholar would have liked to see, and even takes it one full step forward – he brings the issue to be debated and raises it in a way each one of us feels fully equipped to voice concerns. There is no need to be a scholar or a philosopher of some stature to question attitudes, values and norms. Michael Sandel has brought all different elements of society to face the problem, debate it and stop society from unraveling. I truly applaud a scholar, who has successfully taken a philosophical debate outside of the confined space of a classroom, in a manner that gives all of the participants the power to affect change.
Watch Michael Sandel’s discussion on The Moral Limits of Markets
[jwplayer mediaid=”3283″]
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Gil Shidlo took his PhD in political science at the LSE. After working in academia and international organizations, his main interests have focused on investing in stock markets. He contributes regularly to Moneynews.com as well as the Financial Intelligence Report. Most recently he has been studying the increasing role of private equity funds in taking over formerly government assets and companies on both side of the Atlantic. Read more reviews by Gil.
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