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What Money Can't Buy

The Moral Limits of Markets

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What Money Can't Buy

Written by: Michael J Sandel
Narrated by: Michael J Sandel
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About this listen

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Michael J. Sandel's What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, read by the author himself. 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?

©2012 Michael Sandel (P)2012 Penguin Audio Ethics & Morality Philosophy

Critic Reviews

"One of the most popular teachers in the world." ( Observer)
"Sandel is touching something deep in both Boston and Beijing." (Thomas Friedman, New York Times)
"One of the world's most interesting political philosophers." ( Guardian)
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This book is like one of those good movies where the ending keeps you thinking.. The book keeps us on toes till the end, but the author is not able to conclude it properly. It is like opening a wound and not closing it properly.

The book didn’t conclude

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Michael J. Sandel proposes two tests that any good or service should pass if it should be allowed to be on sale for money.
You will find yourself agreeing with Sandel on almost all the examples of goods/services that he argues should _not_ be for sale. What he brings to the table though are well formulated arguments that convince you that there is solid basis for that agreement and not just a "gut feel" that it's wrong. What's more, the two tests can be applied to all goods/services and can aid you in convincing yourself if indeed it makes sense for it to be exchanged for money.
Highly recommended read.

Two tests for things money should be able to buy

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With lots of examples, the author has illustrated the problem of lack of political and moral deliberations and letting the market take all those decisions by default. Very nice read but the only problem is that this version has no sense of chapters and sections.

Great but chapters are not numbered correctly

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It has long been debated appropriateness money as a substitute for ethics and morals. There are acts and deeds which if done without monetary consideration gives us satisfaction which money would never give. With passage of time populace do consider money for exchange of altruistic acts. There are acts for which a doer would refuse to do if a monetary compensation is provided. The book explores the various acts which was once purely based on morals and ethics. Now such acts have turned into money minting acts. Thin thin line separating the altruistic action and action based on monetary consideration has blurred. The book ignites our imagination to think what should be priced (monetary consideration) and what should be done as an altruistism.

Money does buy most of the things

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Enjoyed reading Prof. Sandel's fine exposition on a subject which is increasingly relevant to us today.

Thought provoking !

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