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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

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)
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No matter which book or article I read from Michael Sandel, he always keeps me captivated and makes learning about complex topics really simple. His ability to mould together politics, economics and ethics is beautiful. Do yourself a favour and listen to this audiobook, it will stimulate thought and discussion with your friends and family and make you really question the role money has in our society. When we should be attaching a monetary value, and when attaching a price to something may in fact be the wrong thing to do.

Sandel is an amazing communicator!

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Michael skilfully dissects past and present practices in the financial arena that have had an enormous impact on today’s society. Essential pre-reading for “the chaos machine” by Max Fisher.

You won’t see markets the same way again

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Very well written and supported, and on a topic that touches all of our lives. An inspired read.

A must read

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This is a great book. Sandel gives templates to rebutt or at least cause serious consideration of the claims of Utilitarians who claim we should accept markets as miraculous engines of decision making. He is sharp and entertaining. Well worth the effort. Check out Alisdair McIntyre's virtue ethics work for an intro into these ideas.

A wonderful course in applied Virtue Ethics

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I very convincing argument is put forward by Sandel that markets ultimately change the nature of the goods exchanged thereby changing meaning and actually degrading some long held norms like civic virtues. This is of great concern as Sandel maps the increasing pervasiveness of market thinking and market fundamentalism in society. What makes the situation worse is that new market intiaitves are usually debated on the grounds of fairness and whether free choice will really be free. Sandel warns that this is not enough and that we must not shy away from actually assessing the moral worthiness of the new intiaitve and it's only after deliberating over these matters that we can determine whether a market should exist or whether something may be corrupted as a result and therefore left to be regulated by non market norms. As Sandel rightly observes "shrinking from these questions does not leave them undecided. it simply means that markets will decide them for us....The era of market triumphalism has coincided with a time when public discourse has been largely empty or moral and spiritual substance. Our only hope of keeping markets in their place is to deliberate openly and publicly about the meaning of the goods and social practises we prize."

Very important book in our age of market dominance

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This was a fantastic book, very thought provoking, and the narrator (the author himself) delivered the material in a natural manner that was easy to listen to, and indeed enjoy. The connection between the narrator and his material is obvious and enriches the recitation.

In terms of the content, I am in broad agreement with the thesis that marketisation changes the object so marketised and that this change needs to me properly considered before privatisation and commodification of a thing is undertaken. Even if you disagree, listening to this audiobook will equip you with a good understanding of that position. The examples are interesting (and sometimes shocking), and by the end you grasp the author’s point perfectly clearly.

Excellent all-round

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The author has covered many aspects of modern society where it is questionable whether money should play a role. His analyses are clear and logical, and well worth law-makers to think deeply about. All of us who live in a market economy are affected by the (overly) extensive use of market mechanism that the book has questioned and pondered on.

This book is relevant to everyone living in a market economy

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