What Money Can’t Buy. Michael Sandel on a society where everything could be up for sale.
Photo courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons Author Michael Sandel’s new book What Money Can’t Buy is troubling in the best sense of the word—it “troubles” the complacency with which Americans have received the rapid encroachment of the market into private life. In the post-Freakonomics world, economics has expanded exponentially, not only into the global market but into areas of life not previously governed by market forces. In his book, Sandel explains in both intellectual and historical terms how expansionist ideas of the role of economics coincided with the Reaganite elevation of lassiez-faire principles into something like a religion. What Money Can't Buy - Michael Sandel. Synopsis 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? Deirdre McCloskey: editorials. McCloskey teaches economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and economic history at Gothenburg University in Sweden.
Her latest book, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2010), is the second volume in a series of four entitled The Bourgeois Era. Michael Sandel of Harvard teaches Government and, especially, justice, for which he is internationally known. His book is sweetly written, and offers a good occasion to examine the moral convictions of communitarians, and their distaste for the market. Michael J.
Sandel.