What Money Can't Buy

What Money Can't Buy Plot Summary

Introduction

Markets have become the dominant force in contemporary society, increasingly reaching into domains of life that were once governed by moral or civic norms. This pervasive extension of market thinking and market values raises profound questions about the proper relationship between markets and morality. What happens when everything is for sale? What are the effects on social relationships when monetary transactions replace moral obligations? These questions are not merely abstract philosophical inquiries but central to understanding how modern societies function. While economists typically argue that markets increase efficiency and maximize welfare, they often overlook how market exchanges transform the character of the goods being exchanged. When we decide to monetize certain social practices or human relationships, we may corrupt or degrade their essential nature. By examining concrete examples—from paid line-standing services to commercial surrogacy, from selling access to schools to trading pollution rights—we can discern the moral boundaries that markets should not cross. This exploration reveals two fundamental objections to unfettered markets: they can exacerbate inequality when applied to essential goods, and they can corrupt or degrade certain goods and social practices by valuing them inappropriately.

Chapter 1: Market Triumphalism: The Expansion of Market Values Beyond Economics

The last three decades have witnessed the remarkable expansion of markets and market-oriented thinking into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms. This phenomenon, which we might call "market triumphalism," accelerated following the end of the Cold War when market mechanisms enjoyed unprecedented prestige. While markets have proven extraordinarily successful at organizing productive activity and generating prosperity, their encroachment into every domain of human life raises troubling questions about the kind of society we are becoming. Consider how market logic has infiltrated areas once considered immune to commercial valuation. Healthcare has increasingly become a consumer good, with "concierge doctors" offering premium services to those who can afford annual fees ranging from $1,500 to $25,000. Education has been reconceived as a product to be bought and sold, with elite universities quietly selling preferential admission to children of wealthy donors. Even national security has been marketized, with private military contractors outnumbering U.S. troops in war zones and performing functions once reserved exclusively for state forces. The language of markets now permeates our thinking about relationships and obligations previously understood in moral terms. Economists increasingly describe all human interactions as transactions, analyzing marriage, friendship, and civic duty through the lens of costs and benefits. Gary Becker, a prominent economist, exemplifies this approach in arguing that economics is "a comprehensive method applicable to all human behavior," whether involving money or not. Under this view, even seemingly non-economic activities like raising children or voting in elections reflect calculations of personal utility. This economic imperialism represents more than an academic exercise. It has real consequences for how we organize society and define our obligations to one another. As market values infiltrate nonmarket spheres, they tend to crowd out other values worth caring about—commitment, solidarity, civic virtue, and care. What began as a tool for analyzing economic activity has become a way of understanding all human relations and, increasingly, a template for reorganizing them. The result is that without explicitly choosing to do so, we have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society—a place where market values dominate in virtually every sphere of life. This transformation raises fundamental questions about the proper role and reach of markets, and whether certain goods and practices should remain protected from commercialization.

Chapter 2: Fairness Objection: Markets Under Conditions of Inequality

In a society where everything is for sale, profound inequality matters much more than it otherwise would. As money comes to buy not just luxuries but also essentials—including education, healthcare, political influence, and safe neighborhoods—the distribution of income and wealth determines access to fundamental goods that should be available to all. The fairness objection to unfettered markets centers on this problem: when significant disparities in wealth exist, so-called "free markets" are not truly free for everyone. Consider kidney sales, which proponents defend as mutually beneficial transactions. In theory, the poor person gets much-needed cash, while the wealthy recipient gets a life-saving organ. But such transactions typically occur under conditions of extreme inequality and desperation. When an impoverished villager in a developing country sells his kidney to pay off debts or feed his family, can we genuinely describe this as a free choice? The decision may be nominally voluntary yet effectively coerced by dire necessity and the lack of meaningful alternatives. Similar concerns arise with commercial surrogacy arrangements, particularly when outsourced to women in developing countries. Indian surrogate mothers typically receive around $6,000 for carrying pregnancies for Western couples—a fraction of what American surrogates would be paid, yet a life-changing sum in a country where the average annual income is much lower. The extreme inequality between the contracting parties calls into question the voluntary nature of these agreements. The fairness objection also applies to the increasing commodification of civic goods. When wealthy people can buy their way to the front of the line—at airports, in healthcare, or in gaining access to government officials—they enjoy privileges inaccessible to ordinary citizens. In Washington D.C., companies hire "line-standers" to queue up for congressional hearings, enabling well-heeled lobbyists to gain access to lawmakers while avoiding the hours-long wait that ordinary citizens must endure. This practice effectively allows the affluent to purchase political access, undermining the democratic principle of equal citizenship. The fairness objection does not necessarily reject all markets. Rather, it insists that true freedom of choice requires roughly equal bargaining conditions. When extreme inequality exists, unregulated markets do not produce free exchanges but instead replicate and reinforce existing power imbalances. This objection raises fundamental questions about when voluntary exchange is truly voluntary, and when inequality of resources translates into inequality of freedom.

Chapter 3: Corruption Objection: How Markets Degrade Certain Goods

Beyond concerns about fairness, there is a deeper objection to market encroachment: some goods and social practices are corrupted or degraded when bought and sold. The corruption objection focuses not on unequal bargaining conditions but on the intrinsic nature of certain goods that makes them incompatible with market valuation. This objection arises even under conditions of perfect equality and completely voluntary exchange. Consider friendship. While we might hire people to perform services that friends typically provide—walking our dogs, listening to our problems, or picking up our mail—we cannot actually buy friends. A hired friend is not a real friend. The money that buys the friendship dissolves it or transforms it into something else. Similarly, we might be able to buy a Nobel Prize trophy at auction, but we cannot buy the honor that comes with earning it. These examples reveal something important: certain goods cannot survive the commodification process intact. Other goods can be bought and sold but are diminished or degraded in the process. When parents pay children to read books, they may increase reading in the short term but potentially undermine the intrinsic motivation that sustains a lifelong love of reading. Studies show that introducing monetary incentives often "crowds out" intrinsic motivations. In one experiment, Israeli high school students who collected charitable donations without compensation raised significantly more money than those who were paid a small commission. The financial incentive transformed the activity from a charitable act into a job for pay, diminishing rather than enhancing motivation. The corruption objection also applies to civic goods. When a Swiss village was offered monetary compensation to accept a nuclear waste repository, local support actually decreased from 51% to 25%. The financial incentive transformed a civic-minded sacrifice for the common good into what many villagers perceived as a bribe. Similarly, when blood donation systems shift from voluntary gifts to market-based compensation, the meaning of the activity changes from an act of altruism to a commercial transaction. What these examples demonstrate is that markets are not neutral mechanisms that leave unchanged the goods they exchange. Markets express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being traded. By treating certain goods as commodities to be bought and sold, we can damage or destroy aspects of their value. The corruption objection thus requires us to ask not merely whether markets are efficient or fair but whether they honor and express the right attitudes toward the goods at stake.

Chapter 4: Crowding Out: When Market Incentives Displace Moral Norms

When market values and incentives enter domains previously governed by nonmarket norms, they often don't simply supplement existing motivations but actively displace them. This "crowding out" effect directly challenges standard economic theory, which assumes that adding financial incentives to existing moral or social incentives should strengthen overall motivation. Evidence increasingly shows that the opposite frequently occurs. A particularly illuminating example comes from a study of Israeli daycare centers that decided to impose fines on parents who arrived late to pick up their children. Contrary to economic predictions, the fines led to more late pickups, not fewer. Why? Because the monetary penalty changed the meaning of arriving late. What had been understood as an imposition on the teachers requiring an apology became, with the introduction of the fine, a service for which parents could pay. The fine was transformed into a fee, and moral obligation gave way to market exchange. Even more telling, when the centers removed the fine after sixteen weeks, the higher rate of tardiness persisted—once moral norms were eroded, they proved difficult to restore. Similar effects appear in numerous contexts. Swiss citizens were less willing to accept a nuclear waste facility in their community when offered financial compensation than when simply asked to accept it as a civic duty. Volunteers collecting for charity raised more money when unpaid than when offered a commission. In these cases, financial incentives undermined the moral and civic commitments that had previously motivated behavior. Market proponents often argue that moral and civic virtues are scarce resources that should be conserved rather than depleted through overuse. As economist Lawrence Summers put it in a prayer at Harvard's Memorial Church: "We all have only so much altruism in us. Economists like me think of altruism as a valuable and rare good that needs conserving. Far better to conserve it by designing a system in which people's wants will be satisfied by individuals being selfish." This view treats virtue like a non-renewable resource that gets used up with practice. But this conception fundamentally misunderstands how moral and civic virtues actually work. Unlike material resources that are depleted when consumed, virtues such as generosity, altruism, and civic duty are more like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise. As Aristotle taught, "we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts." Markets don't conserve virtue; they can atrophy it. The crowding out effect has profound implications for how we design institutions and policies. If introducing market incentives into nonmarket relationships corrodes the very values and commitments those incentives were meant to promote, then standard economic prescriptions may be self-defeating. Far from being value-neutral tools, markets actively shape our social practices and the attitudes they express.

Chapter 5: Cases in Context: Market Reasoning in Life, Death, and Civic Spaces

The moral complexities of market encroachment become particularly acute when we examine how commercialization has transformed our relationship with matters of life, death, and shared civic spaces. These domains reveal most starkly how market values can reshape social practices in troubling ways. Consider the striking evolution of life insurance into a vehicle for speculation on strangers' deaths. The practice of "janitors insurance" allows companies to secretly take out policies on low-level employees, collecting benefits when they die—even years after they've left the company. This arrangement creates a disturbing scenario where workers become more valuable to their employers dead than alive. A similar moral discomfort arises with "viaticals," where investors purchase life insurance policies from terminally ill individuals at a discount, profiting when the original policyholders die sooner rather than later. Most recently, Wall Street has begun packaging these death bets into securities—"death bonds"—that can be traded like mortgage-backed securities. The commercialization of death extends to speculative ventures like the Pentagon's proposed "terrorism futures market," which would have allowed investors to bet on terrorist attacks and political assassinations. Though defended on grounds that such markets efficiently aggregate information, the scheme provoked bipartisan moral outrage and was quickly canceled. The objection wasn't merely practical but moral: government-sponsored betting on assassination and terror would normalize and legitimate ghoulish indifference to human suffering. Similar transformations have occurred in civic spaces. Professional sports stadiums, once named for teams or communities, now bear corporate brands through naming rights deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Chicago White Sox no longer play in Comiskey Park but in U.S. Cellular Field. Even the action on the field has been commercialized, with some broadcasters contractually obligated to announce a player sliding into home as "safe at home, safe and secure, New York Life." What was once public commentary on the game has become a vehicle for advertising. Public spaces beyond sports have not been immune. Cities have sold advertising space on police cars, fire hydrants, and school buses. Beach rescues in California are now "brought to you by Chevrolet." Some municipalities have even sold naming rights to subway stations and government buildings. These commercial incursions may seem innocuous—the fire hydrant with a KFC logo still functions as a fire hydrant—but they transform the character of civic space, turning shared public resources into vehicles for private profit. These cases illustrate how market values don't merely supplement but often displace other ways of valuing goods. The problem is not simply that some people can't afford to participate in these markets—the fairness objection—but that the market valuation itself corrupts or degrades the goods and practices at stake. Death becomes a commercial opportunity rather than an occasion for reverence; civic spaces become advertising platforms rather than expressions of common purpose and identity.

Chapter 6: Skyboxification: The Social Consequences of Market Dominance

Perhaps the most profound consequence of market dominance is what might be called the "skyboxification" of American life—the increasing segregation of society based on wealth. Like the luxury skyboxes that now tower above sports stadiums, separating the affluent from ordinary fans below, market values have transformed shared public experiences into stratified ones, where citizens of different economic classes lead increasingly separate lives. The rise of skyboxes in sports venues provides a telling metaphor for this broader social transformation. Throughout most of the twentieth century, ballparks were places where corporate executives and factory workers sat side by side, waited in the same lines for concessions, and got equally wet if it rained. Today, luxury boxes in modern stadiums create entirely separate experiences. The affluent enjoy climate-controlled comfort, private restrooms, and gourmet catering, while never interacting with the general admission crowd below. At Yankee Stadium, luxury suites cost up to $350,000 per season, providing an experience entirely divorced from that of the ordinary fan. This physical segregation reflects a deeper social segregation that pervades contemporary society. As money has come to buy more and more—elite education, premium healthcare, political influence, environmental quality, personal security—the wealthy and the middle or working classes increasingly inhabit different worlds. They attend different schools, receive different medical care, live in different neighborhoods, and enjoy different levels of political representation. Even the basic experiences of citizenship have been transformed by market values, with fast-track lanes at airports and concierge medicine allowing the affluent to bypass the queues that define everyday life for everyone else. The consequences of this separation extend beyond mere inequality of resources to affect the character of civic life itself. Democracy depends on citizens from different backgrounds and social positions sharing in a common life, encountering one another in public spaces, and developing a sense of mutual responsibility despite their differences. When market values dominate every sphere, they undermine this essential civic fabric. As citizens retreat into separate enclaves based on purchasing power, opportunities for meaningful cross-class interaction diminish, and with them the habits of cooperation and mutual regard that sustain democratic citizenship. The skyboxification of American life also erodes the practical foundations for addressing inequality itself. When the affluent can effectively opt out of public services through private alternatives—from gated communities with private security to exclusive schools and premium healthcare—their stake in the quality of public provision diminishes. The result is a vicious cycle where deteriorating public services further incentivize private exit by those who can afford it, leaving public institutions increasingly underfunded and undervalued. This withdrawal from shared spaces and experiences isn't just a consequence of inequality; it represents a fundamental shift in how we understand citizenship and social obligation. As market values displace civic ideals, the very notion of the "public"—public goods, public spaces, public purposes—becomes increasingly tenuous.

Chapter 7: Rethinking Market Boundaries: What Money Should Not Buy

Determining the proper place of markets requires moving beyond the simplistic debate between market fundamentalists and those who reflexively oppose them. Markets are valuable tools for organizing productive economic activity, but they are not appropriate for every sphere of life. We need a more nuanced approach to deciding where markets belong and where they don't—one that acknowledges both their virtues and their limits. Such an approach must recognize that markets are not merely mechanisms for delivering goods efficiently; they also express and promote particular attitudes toward the goods being exchanged. When we decide that something may be bought and sold, we implicitly treat it as a commodity—an instrument of profit and use. But not all goods are properly valued this way. Human beings, for instance, are not commodities to be traded, which is why we prohibit slavery and reject markets in children, even if such markets might operate "efficiently" in economic terms. Similarly, civic duties like jury service or voting cannot be outsourced or sold without degrading their purpose. These activities are not private property but public responsibilities that require personal performance. To commodify them would be to misunderstand their essential character. The same principle applies to many goods and practices whose integrity depends on nonmarket values: education as more than job training, healthcare as more than a consumer good, environmental protection as more than a cost-benefit calculation. Deciding which goods should remain outside market valuation requires addressing deeper questions about the purpose and meaning of social practices. We must ask not only whether markets deliver goods efficiently but whether market valuation honors or undermines the ways these goods should be valued. This means engaging with contested conceptions of the good life and the proper aims of social institutions—precisely the moral and political questions that market reasoning tends to bracket or avoid. The fact that these questions are morally contestable is not a reason to evade them. Indeed, the tendency to avoid substantive moral debate about the good life has left a vacuum that market reasoning has rushed to fill. Our reluctance to engage in these debates doesn't leave them undecided; it merely ensures that markets will decide them by default. A more robust public discourse would grapple openly with the moral meaning of social goods and practices, debating when market values enhance or diminish their purpose. This approach doesn't mean banishing markets from every noneconomic sphere. In some cases, using market incentives to achieve worthy social goals may be justifiable, even if it represents a moral compromise. The key is to recognize explicitly when we are making such compromises rather than assuming that expanding markets is always progress. We need to acknowledge the moral costs of treating certain goods as commodities, even when we decide those costs are worth bearing.

Summary

At the core of this analysis lies a fundamental insight: markets are not merely neutral mechanisms for distributing goods efficiently but powerful social institutions that shape our values and relationships. When market logic extends beyond economic domains into realms of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms, it doesn't just change how we distribute goods—it transforms how we value them and, ultimately, how we value one another. The two primary objections to market encroachment—fairness and corruption—reveal what's at stake in the marketization of everything. The fairness objection reminds us that market freedom requires something approaching equality of resources, especially for essential goods. The corruption objection goes deeper, showing how market valuation can degrade certain goods and practices by valuing them inappropriately. Together, these objections offer a framework for thinking critically about where markets belong and where they don't. This approach doesn't reject markets wholesale but insists that their proper role depends on the character of the goods at stake and the norms that should govern them. For those concerned about the hollowing out of public life and the erosion of non-market values, this framework provides analytical tools to articulate what we find troubling about a world where everything has its price. It challenges us to envision a society where markets serve human values rather than define them.

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Michael J. Sandel

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