56 pages • 1 hour read
Michael J. SandelWhat Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Michael Sandel
Michael Sandel is a political philosopher with an interest in democracy, ethics, justice, and markets. Sandel received his PhD as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and now works as Professor of Government at Harvard University. His widely lauded course, Justice, offered through Harvard, has been made available as a free online course; it has been viewed by tens of millions of people. The popularity of this course, and of Sandel’s subsequent addresses, has led to Sandel gaining a reputation as a public intellectual.
Sandel is particularly interested in economic and societal privilege (which he critiques), and in the increasingly commercialized nature of society. Sandel feels that the infiltration of free-market values into nonmarket spaces threatens to corrupt many institutions and values. As well as his courses, Sandel has a BBC Radio 4 series, The Public Philosopher, has given talks at the London School of Economics, and has spoken to public audiences internationally.
Greg Mankiw
Greg Mankiw is an economic theorist who supports the ubiquitous appearance of free-market values in society. Mankiw believes in an inherent righteousness imposed by free-market practices, such as ticket scalping, in that markets ensure that resources reach those who value them the most through a principle of supply and demand.
Sandel, by contrast, is interested in the links between Free-Market Values and Social Inequality. He challenges Mankiw by pointing out that people have unequal access to financial means: “[T]he willingness to pay for a good does not show who values it most highly. This is because market prices reflect the ability as well as the willingness to pay” (37, emphasis added). Sandel thus asserts that economists like Mankiw ignore or downplay the ethical and civic dimensions of excessive free-market influence.
Barbara Harris
Barbara Harris is the founder of the North-Carolina based charity Project Prevention. She established this charity to prevent the birth of babies suffering from addiction; this occurs when babies are born to mothers who are addicts using substances throughout their pregnancy. Project Prevention offers a cash incentive for female addicts to undergo sterilization or long-term birth control.
Harris’s charity raises concerns around the use of incentives to shape behavior. Sandel suggests that there are some things that should not be monetized, and that market values have infiltrated too many aspects of life, as is epitomized in Harris’s attempt to solve a complex social problem through financial incentivization alone.
Furthermore, critics point out that, through the scheme, vulnerable women are targeted and coerced into giving up their reproductive rights. Sandel uses examples such as Harris’s scheme to suggest that market participation isn’t truly voluntary, as economists who support free-market values suggest, but instead that participation is often coerced. Opponents of the charity point out that the scheme funds the women’s drug problems, rather than helping to treat them. The proposal was rejected in the United Kingdom, but was taken up in some African countries by women who tested HIV positive.
Richard Titmuss
British sociologist Richard Titmuss comparatively examined the British and American blood bank systems in a 1970 study. Britain relied on charitable donations, whereas America offered money for blood donations. This study provided generalizable findings on the power of commercialization compared to the power of altruism, as well as the impact that market values have on coexisting civic values.
Britain attained greater supplies of blood, proving that charitable donations made greater sense from a pragmatic, economic perspective. Furthermore, Sandel’s suggestion that commodifying a service or object inherently changes the way it is perceived socially is supported in the fact that, in America, charitable donations dropped off hugely, as it was understood as a commercial, rather than altruistic enterprise. This is an instance of the “crowding-out” of altruism.
The social equity issue was also raised by America’s move to commercialized blood donations, as these donations were supplied primarily from poor neighborhoods and prisons, reflecting Free-Market Values and Social Inequality. Sandel proposes that low socio-economic groups suffer disproportionately from the proliferation of free-market values.
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