What Money Can't Buy cover art

What Money Can't Buy

The Moral Limits of Markets

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What Money Can't Buy

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 Morality Money Socialism Capitalism

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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)
All stars
Most relevant
In one word that explains how you feel after listening to this book. Clear and articulate with a flow that is almost fiction-like ... This book has both haunted and delighted me for months ... I don't honestly know where to turn but if the trends beautifully explained in this book continue unabated and unchanged then the future ahead will be a dystopian nightmare from which there is no escape!!

Astounded

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For the first time someone has been able to crystallise and explain the misgivings I have felt about the commodification of everything that has occurred since the 1980s.

Michael Sandel sets out all the objections to 'market worship' in terms of the unfairness and corruption inherent in the economic view of every area of life, using a range of easy to understand examples from selling blood to viatical insurance.

I would recommend this book to everyone who feels uneasy at the idea of people having advertising slogans tattooed on their bodies, or who feel horrified at the idea of bidding to adopt a baby.

Most of all I would recommend it to anyone who really wants to understand the real meaning of "the price of everything and the value of nothing".

Superb analysis

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Really, really interesting, and excellently narrated by the author. Poses questions that make you consider the ethical values of commercialism: just because you can (afford to), should you?

Thought provoking!!

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This should be a 'must read' for everyone who is concerned for ethics in a world that are children are going to inherit.

FIRST CLASS IN ALL RESPECTS!

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This books explains why advertising and pricing sometimes degrades the things they’re put upon. In a talk with people who can’t see anything wrong in it you are often left unable to explain why it is wrong. This book ask the questions of everything should be for sale or are some things polluted by it. Great book.

The inexpressible problems with market economics

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