What Money Can T Buy Chapter Summary

In the New York Times bestseller, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of the Markets, Michael Sandel provides a fresh approach for evaluating the role of the free markets and how they impact everyday life. Sandel argues that the reach of the markets, into all spheres of life, has lead to the commodification of essentially every human activity, which corrupts and crowds out nonmarket values. He defines this revolution, which has taken place over the last thirty years, as a drift “…from having a market economy to being a market society.” What Money Can’t Buy intends to spark an enlightened debate on whether people should be able to put a price on certain goods or activities. The book is a new development in the sense that it analyzes the
Through these various examples, his intention is to communicate the idea that we currently live in a society where everything can be bought and sold. Sandel states that the reach of the markets has expanded and “Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone but increasingly governs the whole of life.” He determines that that the transformation towards a market society has caused us to lose sight of what we truly value. Ultimately, Sandel is concerned about the free markets to the extent that they are invasive and corrupt the very nature of the good things in
He expresses that protecting individual liberties is a primary concern but in order to do that we must preserve individual values and promote civic virtues. Sandel would argue that the liberal idea of market neutrality, which disregards the relevant value of certain individual preferences or values, is a primary contributor to the demise of society. His analysis of the moral limits of the markets highlights the liberal state’s contribution towards fostering market reasoning in spheres of life that it perhaps shouldn’t. Through the development of the liberal state, or market based economy, widespread expansion of the markets has created a society where market principles maintain an imperial force in our private lives and public