What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

Michael J. Sandel

256 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012

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Harvard University political philosopher Michael Sandel is one of our nation's preeminent public intellectuals. Author of many notable books, he is a masterful instructor of a legendary form called "Justice," also off ered online and on television and seen by millions.

Sandel'southward mode of operation is straightforward: He tackles large and important questions in clear, engaging prose, examining a feature of gimmicky life in which ethical boundaries have been transgressed or where an important upstanding business concern has been leached from argue. In previous piece of work, Sandel has expressed anxiety almost a diminishing capacity to talk about moral issues in American politics and ceremonious gild, and he has sounded an alarm virtually the quest for perfection in biomedical research and genetic engineering.

Sandel'due south new volume takes up the undeniably important question: What are the moral limits of the market place? What shouldn't money buy? True to form, he worries that things have gone too far, that we have "drifted from having a market economy to beingness a marketplace guild." His aim is to evidence the moral cost of what happens when everything is for sale, when any good can be commodified.

Far from an academic treatise, the book consists mainly of short example studies of surprising new bolt and labor forms. The outset chapter is about the line-jumping market—people who are paid to stand in line at airports, congressional hearings, or amusement parks, as well as those who work as ticket scalpers and so-called concierge doctors. The 2d chapter is about encouraging or limiting various behaviors through market incentives, such as tradable pollution permits, cash for good grades, payments for human organs, or a market place in accepting refugees. The tertiary chapter examines how markets can crowd out desirable moral norms: hiring friends, purchasing wedding toasts, auctioning higher admissions, and buying rather than altruistic claret. The quaternary affiliate takes up markets in life and expiry, roofing Cyberspace decease pools, a terrorism futures marketplace, and death bonds. The last affiliate questions the proliferation of naming rights, such equally the Falik Men's Room at Harvard, endowed by alumnus William Falik. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction!

Examples abound in Sandel's volume, making for a expert, even rollicking read. And as the examples accumulate, ane begins to appreciate just how deeply markets and market place behavior accept rooted themselves in virtually all aspects of our lives. The claim that nosotros are a marketplace lodge, as opposed to having a market economy, seems not far-fetched.

Yet Sandel is not arguing against markets per se. Rather, he proposes that markets should have limits. He identifies two moral concerns. Offset, when markets exist everywhere, he argues, we need to worry more about inequality. If money can buy more and more, including political influence and better health care and education, then having coin matters more and more. 2d, making sure appurtenances into commodities can corrupt the very value of these appurtenances; market norms can crowd out valuable nonmarket beliefs.

Sandel's first point is really an argument about fairness. If money is the necessary ways to obtaining certain goods, or a certain quality of goods, then the poor volition exist systematically disadvantaged in the marketplace. The 2d argument about market norms displacing valuable nonmarket beliefs, however, is Sandel's principal preoccupation. For Sandel, markets not simply allocate appurtenances, they "express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods existence exchanged." Paying cash for practiced grades, for example, may corrode an intrinsic want to learn.

A famous case of this miracle, twice discussed by Sandel, is a study of childcare providers in Israel. The twenty-four hours intendance centers were having a problem with parents arriving by endmost time. Several providers opted to introduce a fine for late pickups. The result was an increase in late pickups, because parents treated the fine as a fee they were willing to pay rather than construing on-fourth dimension pickup as a norm they were expected to uphold. For Sandel, this demonstrates how attaching a price to certain moral or civic goods can diminish or corrupt those goods.

Like the worry well-nigh unfairness, corruption is a reasonable concern. But Sandel never delivers an argument nigh exactly how to determine whether or when market norms volition displace nonmarket beliefs. Or more important—because markets can promote efficiency and liberty and bureau—Sandel off ers no resources to referee whether the do good from commodifying sure goods is worth the price to nonmarket norms.

Sandel'south talent is for identifying and request important questions about the identify of markets. Just the book does not try to answer these questions. Even in the many examples Sandel describes, the reader is left unsure whether he believes that some moral limit has been transgressed. And then although Sandel is expert at assembling worrisome examples and challenging readers to puzzle through their ain intuitions and views near markets, he could have accomplished more.

Beginning, Sandel could take conveyed a more sophisticated view almost markets. Not all markets and marketplace exchanges are alike, or take the potential to corrupt valuable nonmarket norms. Take for instance the simple distinction between goods offered for auction past for-profits vs. nonprofits. Commodification looks different if the marketplace is populated by nonprofit organizations, but this distinction is lost in Sandel's undifferentiated treatment of markets.

Second, Sandel could have offered a more sophisticated framework for thinking about the limits of markets, a framework capable of delivering guidance about where the limits are. Sandel ignores a growing literature on this topic. Books by philosophers Debra Satz and Elizabeth Anderson, or by economists Kenneth Pointer and Amartya Sen, all provide a more sophisticated business relationship of the limits of markets.

Sandel, however, is operating in public intellectual and provocateur mode—to raise important questions for public debate. What Money Can't Buy is neither original nor deep, but if it stimulates a wider public discussion almost the emergence of a marketplace society, information technology will have succeeded on its own terms.