What Money Can''t Buy

What happens when everything is up for sale—from education and environmental protection to friendship and civic duty? In What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, philosopher Michael J. Sandel explores one of the most pressing questions of modern life: Are there moral boundaries that markets should not cross?

Sandel argues that over the last few decades, the pervasive reach of market thinking has transformed society. We’ve moved silently from a market economy—a tool for organizing production—to a market society, a way of living where commercial logic governs nearly every human activity. The resulting moral and civic consequences, he asserts, are profound. When everything is for sale, the meaning and value of social goods themselves begin to erode.

A World Saturated by Market Values

From paying for prison cell upgrades to buying access to the carpool lane, from selling naming rights to public spaces to offering cash-for-sterilization programs, Sandel catalogs examples that reveal how the logic of markets has colonized spheres once governed by moral or civic norms. These practices, he insists, are not minor inconveniences but moral turning points. When public goods become private privileges, the sense of shared citizenship and civic equality dissolves.

For Sandel, the key challenge isn’t economic efficiency but moral meaning. Market transactions not only allocate goods—they express the way we value those goods. Paying children to read books might get them to read more, but it teaches them that learning is a chore purchased for money rather than a joy cultivated through curiosity. Selling college admissions to wealthy donors may raise funds but corrupts the ideal of education as a path to merit.

Two Crucial Objections: Fairness and Corruption

Throughout the book, Sandel distinguishes between two main objections to markets: fairness and corruption. The fairness objection centers on inequality—when the poor face coerced choices (like selling organs to survive), market exchanges cease to be truly voluntary. The corruption objection is deeper: even if conditions are fair, putting a price on certain moral or civic goods can degrade them. It changes their meaning, promoting values that corrode the human spirit.

For example, hiring soldiers as private contractors may seem efficient, but it commodifies civic responsibility and weakens the bonds of citizenship. Selling pollution rights might reduce emissions cheaply, but it reframes environmental stewardship as a transaction rather than a shared obligation. These cases demonstrate that markets inject a logic of utility and profit into spheres where dignity and virtue should prevail.

From Economic Success to Moral Crisis

Sandel situates this transformation within what he calls the era of market triumphalism, spanning from the 1980s Reagan-Thatcher period to the post-Cold War boom. Economists celebrated markets as mechanisms for producing wealth, while governments worldwide privatized public functions. After the 2008 financial crisis, however, the moral legitimacy of this faith began to fray. Sandel saw a chance to ask not only whether the markets worked—but whether they should rule our lives.

Drawing on examples from civic life, health, education, sports, and even death, he shows how the hidden costs of commodification aren’t measured in dollars but in the degradation of values. When friendship can be bought, it ceases to be friendship; when loyalty is priced, it becomes labor. This insight, resonant with Aristotle’s notion that virtue is cultivated through practice, underscores Sandel’s central moral vision: markets alter the character of the goods they touch.

Why This Debate Matters

The problem, Sandel warns, is not moralizing against markets but rediscovering public conversation about what goods mean. In an age of partisan shouting and moral silence, he offers a new civic dialogue—a chance to decide, collectively, where markets serve the public good and where they destroy it. Only by reclaiming our role as moral agents, he says, can we stop money’s encroachment into domains of love, virtue, and justice.

“The question of markets,” Sandel writes, “is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale, or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?”

In essence, Sandel challenges you to see economics as inseparable from ethics. Understanding what money cannot buy, he insists, teaches us not only how to value markets—but what we truly value as human beings.

Imagine paying someone to say sorry on your behalf or to write your friend’s heartfelt wedding toast. It might work practically—but morally, something feels off. In one of his most illuminating sections, Sandel explores how markets don’t just organize exchange; they reshape character. The more we buy and sell, he argues, the more market norms displace moral ones, in a phenomenon he calls the crowding-out effect.

Money Alters Meaning

Sandel shows that commodifying certain acts—friendship, apologies, gifts—undermines their integrity. In China, professional apologizers offer to make amends for clients unwilling to do so themselves, promising eloquence for a fee. The result? The apology loses authenticity, because sincerity can’t be outsourced. Similarly, websites selling “perfect wedding speeches” for $149 produce impressive words but corrupt the gesture. Once you learn that your friend purchased his toast online, its sentimental warmth cools instantly.

These examples reveal Sandel’s signature insight: putting a price on certain human goods changes their nature. Friendship, gratitude, honor, and love are not commodities to be transacted—they are practices built on trust, virtue, and mutual recognition. Turn them into pay-for-service models, and they dissolve.

The Economics of Gift Giving

Economists, Sandel notes, often view gifts as inefficient ways to maximize happiness. Joel Waldfogel’s famous paper “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas” calculated how holiday gifts waste billions in utility because people prefer what they’d buy for themselves. Economists like Gregory Mankiw defend giving cash instead—it’s more efficient. But, Sandel replies, to treat generosity as a market transaction misses its moral point. Gift giving is about expressing care, not optimizing resources. A $20 tie may delight your father more than a crisp $20 bill.

Gift cards illustrate this transformation: designed to ease shopping inefficiencies, they monetize sentiment while leaving just enough “thoughtfulness” intact to disguise the commodification. The moral difference between gifts and cash, Sandel argues, reflects our intuitions about meaning: attention matters. When giving becomes transactional, affection turns calculative.

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation

Drawing on behavioral research, Sandel explains that payment can blunt moral motivation. In one study, Israeli day-care centers fined parents for picking up their children late. Instead of improving punctuality, lateness increased. Why? The fine transformed a moral obligation into a financial convenience—the parents were no longer inconsiderate, just paying for extra childcare. Similarly, when Swiss towns offered money for accepting nuclear waste sites, public opposition doubled. Cash incentives, far from inspiring cooperation, replaced civic duty with selfish calculus.

These findings support Sandel’s observation that market reasoning often degrades moral reasoning. When every act can be priced, people stop asking what’s right—they ask only what’s profitable.

Markets and Meaning

Ultimately, Sandel invites you to consider whether moral growth itself thrives under market logic. Economists like Dennis Robertson and Lawrence Summers claim that altruism is a “scarce resource” to be economized. Sandel counters: virtue works like a muscle—it strengthens with use. When societies substitute market incentives for civic values, they impoverish themselves spiritually. True citizenship, friendship, or generosity cannot be bought—they must be practiced.

What if governments could solve social problems simply by paying people to do good? In exploring modern experiments from cash-for-sterilization programs to financial rewards for students, Sandel exposes the ethical dilemmas of incentivization—a market-minded approach to human behavior that turns moral acts into transactions.

Cash for Sterilization: When Help Becomes Bribery

The story begins with Barbara Harris’s Project Prevention, which pays drug-addicted women $300 to undergo sterilization. Harris defends it as pragmatic compassion—preventing suffering for unborn children. Critics see coercion and moral degradation. Sandel dissects both sides: while no coercion exists in law, the financial lure preys upon vulnerability, manipulating those least able to choose freely. The result exemplifies his distinction between coercion (inequality makes choices unfair) and corruption (buying certain goods degrades them). Here, the “good” of procreation becomes a tradable asset, distorting its intrinsic value as a human trust.

Paying Kids to Learn

Harvard economist Roland Fryer tested paying students for academic achievement—ranging from $25 per test to $532 per year. Results were mixed: small reading improvements occurred, but deep learning stalled. Sandel explains why: turning learning into labor erodes curiosity. Students may read more, but not better. Education, he says, relies on intrinsic engagement; bribing virtue cheapens it. The experiments reveal a paradox—financial rewards may boost compliance but destroy meaning.

Health Bribes and Virtue

Companies offering cash to quit smoking or lose weight face similar troubles. Even when bribes “work,” they corrupt the very attitude health requires—care for oneself. Sandel argues that ethical living cannot be coerced by price; it must arise from self-respect. Paying people to take medication or exercise substitutes manipulation for motivation. The moral loss persists beyond metrics.

When Fines Turn Into Fees

Sandel’s most vivid example of market reasoning gone awry comes from Israeli parents who paid fines for late daycare pickups, treating penalties as fees. The distinction is crucial: fines express moral disapproval; fees simply price behavior. When moral sanctions become business transactions, public norms collapse. Whether it’s parking in disabled spots or buying the right to pollute, the question shifts from “Is it right?” to “Is it affordable?”

Through incentives, fines, and bribes, Sandel exposes how markets entwine with morality. Economic reasoning, he warns, doesn’t stay neutral—it reshapes culture, redefining virtue as a commodity. True goodness must remain priceless to preserve its power.

What happens when life itself becomes an investment? In one of the book’s darkest chapters, Sandel examines markets that trade on mortality—from corporate life insurance to death futures. These examples ask a haunting question: can profit coexist with dignity?

Janitors Insurance and Viaticals

Sandel recounts Walmart’s purchase of life insurance on employees—policies that pay the company when workers die. These workers, unaware of being “insured,” turn into financial assets. Similarly, the viatical industry buys life insurance from the terminally ill for resale to investors, who profit when the insured dies. The moral discomfort arises not from legality but from corruption. Turning mortality into speculation erodes respect for human life.

The Death Pool and Terrorism Futures

Online “death pools” invite gamblers to bet on celebrity deaths. When the Pentagon proposed a terrorism futures market to predict assassinations, public outrage shut it down. Even when such systems aim to yield useful predictions, Sandel insists that the moral cost outweighs efficiency. Betting on death commodifies tragedy. It corrodes empathy—the foundation of civic life.

Death Bonds: Wall Street’s Final Frontier

Financial firms now bundle life insurance policies into securities—“death bonds”—just as they once did mortgages. Investors profit when policyholders die sooner rather than later. Sandel sees in this the culmination of market society’s logic: the transformation of human fate into financial risk. Once death can be traded, life itself becomes a commodity like pork bellies or oil futures.

“We are back,” Sandel warns, “to the moral universe of 18th-century gambling houses—only now on a scale that makes their wagers on death seem quaint.”

His conclusion is stark yet hopeful: societies must reclaim the meaning of life from the calculus of profit. Otherwise, the most sacred human experience—mortality—becomes just another tradable asset.

Sandel’s tour of modern commercialism reveals how advertising and sponsorship colonize every corner of existence—from baseball autographs to branded classrooms and city parks. When ads permeate life, public spaces lose their soul.

Naming Rights and Skyboxes

Where stadiums once celebrated civic pride—Yankee Stadium, Tiger Stadium—now stand corporate emblems: Citi Field, Comerica Park. Even home runs are branded (“Bank One blast”). Luxury skyboxes, separated from ordinary fans, turn sporting events from communal gatherings into class-segregated spectacles. Sports, once the great equalizer, becomes another frontier in the “skyboxification” of society—a term Sandel coins to describe growing social stratification through market privilege.

Municipal Marketing and Sponsored Spaces

Cash-strapped towns sell naming rights to beaches, parks, and subway stations. A Skippy Peanut Butter logo on beach sand or Coca-Cola partnerships with city halls exemplify how fiscal desperation opens civic spaces to private branding. Sandel reminds readers that when governments market public goods, citizenship itself becomes transactional. Parks and schools cease to embody shared belonging—they become ad inventory.

Ads in Schools and Jails

Channel One, a TV network selling captive student viewership to advertisers, epitomizes commercialization’s reach. Sponsored curricula, like coal-funded science kits, manipulate children’s values under the guise of education. For Sandel, this isn’t merely bias—it corrupts the aim of schooling: to cultivate citizens, not consumers.

“The purpose of advertising,” he writes, “is to create consumers. The purpose of public education is to create citizens.”

Ultimately, Sandel sees rampant commercialism as civic pollution. Like carbon emissions, each ad may seem harmless, but collectively they degrade the moral environment. When everything is brought to you by Mastercard, we risk forgetting what cannot be bought at all.

In his concluding reflection, Sandel introduces one of his most powerful metaphors—the skyboxification of everyday life. He argues that the rise of market inequality mirrors the spread of luxury suites, separating the privileged from the public. The danger isn’t only economic; it’s moral and civic.

Markets and Inequality

Skyboxes symbolize how affluence now buys social isolation. Once, ballparks mixed CEOs with janitors under the same roof. Today, the rich watch games in insulated glass towers, buffered from the crowd. Sandel uses this as an image of modern democracy’s crisis. As markets expand and public spaces vanish, citizens lose shared experiences—those moments where different lives intersect and collective identity forms.

Common Life and Civic Virtue

Democracy, Sandel insists, requires more than equality before law—it requires living together. Civic virtue grows through encounters with difference, not retreat into privilege. When everything—from education to recreation—is stratified by price, we stop seeing ourselves as fellow citizens and start seeing competitors in the marketplace.

Markets Decide in Silence

Sandel warns that avoiding moral conversation doesn’t protect pluralism—it cedes moral authority to markets. “Shrinking from these questions,” he writes, “does not leave them undecided. It simply means markets will decide them for us.” The remedy is public deliberation—open debate about which goods money should never buy.

By grounding economics in ethics, Sandel offers not policy prescriptions but a vision: a renewed democratic life where citizens reimagine value beyond price. The book ends where it began—with the haunting question resonating in every reader’s conscience: What can’t money buy, and what happens to us when we forget?