What Money Can't Buy

SHOULD WE PAY CHILDREN TO READ BOOKS ORTO GET GOOD GRADES? Should we allow corporations to pay for the right to pollute the atmosphere? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to dónate their organs? What about auctioning admission to elite universities? Selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In the international bestseller What Money Can’t Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes up one oí the biggest ethical questions of our tinte: Is títere something wrong with a World in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent niarket valúes from reaching into spheres of life where they don’t belong? What are the litoral limits of ntarkets? In recent decades, market valúes 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 argües, we have drifted from havíng a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be? In Justíce, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can’t Buy, he provokes an essential discussion that we, in our market-driven age, need to have: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society—and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets don’t honor and that money can’t buy?