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

· Penguin UK
4.2
16 reviews
Ebook
256
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? 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? Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale?

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.

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?

Ratings and reviews

4.2
16 reviews
Andrew Conway
August 11, 2014
The point is well argued and demonstrated, but at times it felt like lengthy lists of examples. I would have liked more of Sandel's own opinions to be made explicit. I hesitate to say that because I also applaud his restraint at times, and his desire to let the facts speak for themselves, something which is lacking in over-opinionated public discourse.
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A Google user
February 6, 2018
I said okay!!!
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Anil Das
September 10, 2023
AAA BOSS NETWORK
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About the author

Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University. His legendary 'Justice' course is the first Harvard course made freely available online (www.JusticeHarvard.org) and on television. Hiss work has been translated into 15 languages and been the subject of television series in the U.K., the U.S., Japan, South Korea, Sweden, and the Middle East. He has delivered the Tanner Lectures at Oxford and been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne, Paris. In 2010, China Newsweek named him the "most influential foreign figure of the year" in China. Sandel was the 2009 BBC Reith Lecturer, and his most recent book Justice is an international bestseller.

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