Review: ‘What Money Can’t Buy’ – Michael Sandel

 4 writers read up on political philosopher, Michael Sandel’s, latest release: What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets and give their verdicts…

For a taster of the material, check out the lecture below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvDpYHyBlgc

Michael Sandel is one of those rare gems that manages to explore deep, complex philosophical issues in a way that doesn’t leave you needing a stiff drink and a few episodes of mindless reality TV to numb the pain. In What Money Can’t Buy he asks why we should worry about the fact that market values extend to almost every conceivable part of human life. How should we feel about the fact that you can donate to sterilise drug-addicted women? Or that prisoners can buy a nicer cell? Or that you can pay the homeless to stand in lines for you?

This book perfectly manages to articulate a concern that I think we all share. How can we protect the true value of what is most important? And how do we keep money out of its value? Of course, these questions are extremely heavy. But the joy of Sandel’s writing is that he is truly engaging and, very often, funny.

We all need to start thinking about What Money Can’t Buy and this is the book that will help you think clearly. Several books a year get declared to be ‘important works’ so I won’t bother doing that, but what this book explores is important. If you don’t believe me ask your friend whether you should be able to pay to kill an endangered animal, if the money goes towards conservation. The ensuing argument will give you all the reason you need to read this book.

–       Dan Mountain 

Pictorial review by Helen Kalpus

It has taken five years for an esteemed academic to step out in the post-financial crisis world and challenge the free-market consensus which dominates Western thought – but with the coming of What Money Can’t Buy we find that Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel is just that man.

The central thesis of Sandel’s accessible book is that free-market distribution is not morally neutral. Where the status quo answers the question ‘how do we allocate x?’ with ‘Markets, because they are most efficient’. Sandel asks us to think again about the purpose and nature of x – where we have gone wrong is moving from ‘a market economy, to a market society’. Sandel’s true talents lie in his ability to bring philosophy back to the mainstream with his accessible (but not condescending) writing and his ability to practically apply his thoughts – in this regard, he has produced another brilliant book.

What Money Can’t Buy is a book peppered with examples from the real life which make it a rapid tour of a world of moral situations and issues, ranging from the fare-dodgers on the Paris Metro who set up a mutual fund to allow them to profit from law-breaking, to Chinese access to healthcare.  

–    Jack Egan

When I see people on my news feed cynically write “love doesn’t mean anything these days”, I question how morally degenerative our society is compared to the past or whether an inevitable sense of nostalgia is at work. However, Michael J. Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy has articulated the uncomfortable idea that increased marketisation has affected the relations we have with objects and how we perceive their value.

The anecdote of the newspaper that, in response to ticket scalping for camping trips, declared “Is nothing sacred?” reminded me of the panicked faces of people that scrabbled for twenty pence coins just to go to the toilet at Manchester Piccadilly. There’s a fear that the more we are forced to begrudgingly (excuse the pun) spend a penny for things that were once free, the more morally questionable our lives become.

This book warns of how the more desensitized we become to the way markets pervade every aspect of our lives, from the bizarre hiring of people to stand in queues to selling advertising space on your forehead, the more our morals will be dictated by market values.

Therefore, next time someone says “that’s a privilege, not a right”, think about whether the market has impacted on this opinion. I’m just worried what the idiom “selling your own grandmother” will come to mean in the next thirty years.  

–     Lillian Hingley