Chapter 1
When Markets Put a Price on Everything
Have you ever wondered what it would cost to shoot an endangered rhino? How about buying your way to the front of an airport security line? Or perhaps paying someone to stand in line for you at a congressional hearing? In today's world, almost everything has a price tag. Michael J. Sandel's provocative bestseller "What Money Can't Buy" explores this phenomenon with intellectual rigor and moral urgency. Since its publication in 2012, the book has sparked global debate about market values encroaching on all aspects of life. Praised by Nobel laureate Robert Solow as "a wake-up call to recognize our moral predicament," Sandel's work has influenced policymakers, business leaders, and ordinary citizens to question whether some things simply shouldn't be for sale. The book's insights feel even more relevant today as technology creates new marketplaces for everything from personal data to surrogate wombs, challenging us to reconsider where we draw the line between commerce and common good.
Chapter 2
The Market Triumphalism That Changed Everything
The three decades before the 2008 financial crisis marked an era of unprecedented market faith. Beginning with Reagan and Thatcher in the early 1980s and continuing through Clinton and Blair's market-friendly liberalism, this period saw markets and market-oriented thinking expand into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms. The collapse of communism further cemented the idea that markets represented the only way to organize economic life.
This market triumphalism transformed how we view public goods, civic responsibilities, and even human relationships. Today, you can purchase upgraded prison cells for $82 per night, pay $8 to drive solo in carpool lanes during rush hour, or spend $1,500 annually for your doctor's cell phone number. Companies can take out life insurance policies on low-level employees without their knowledge, profiting when they die. Wealthy hunters can pay $150,000 to shoot endangered black rhinos in the name of conservation.
The 2008 financial crisis shook faith in markets' efficiency but paradoxically strengthened market thinking in many domains. The crisis discredited government more than banks, with its most notable political consequence being the Tea Party movement's embrace of free-market principles that would have made Reagan blush. Later, Occupy Wall Street protested corporate power and inequality, but both movements expressed outrage against bailouts rather than challenging market fundamentalism itself.
Our politics has become morally vacant-not because of too much moral conviction, but too little. We've banished substantive debate about the good life from public discourse, embracing instead a market reasoning that doesn't judge preferences but only asks "how much?" This nonjudgmental stance has drained public discourse of moral energy and contributed to a technocratic, managerial politics that fails to inspire or challenge citizens.
What we need is a robust debate about the moral limits of markets-where they serve the public good and where they don't belong. Such a debate would invigorate our politics by welcoming competing notions of the good life rather than pretending all values can be measured in market terms.
Chapter 3
When Waiting in Line Becomes Optional
Nobody likes waiting in line. While discreet queue-jumping through bribes has long existed, selling the right to cut in line has recently become an open, familiar practice across various domains of public life.
At airports nationwide, first-class passengers now bypass security lines through "Fast Track" services. For around $39, even coach passengers can purchase priority boarding and security line privileges. London's Luton Airport sells queue-jumping for just 3. Critics argue security checks should be equally shared burdens, not purchasable conveniences, while airlines counter that everyone receives the same screening-only the wait varies by price.
Amusement parks have embraced this model too. Universal Studios sells premium passes (around twice standard admission) that let visitors cut to the front of ride lines. Some parks discreetly usher VIP guests through separate entrances to avoid offending regular customers, suggesting an underlying discomfort with paid line-cutting, though Universal boldly advertises its $149 "Front of Line Pass." Even traditional tourist attractions like the Empire State Building now offer Express Passes at double the regular admission price.
Commuters increasingly buy their way out of traffic congestion as well. What began as carpool lanes in the 1980s has evolved into express lanes available to solo drivers willing to pay up to $10 during rush hour. Cities like San Diego, Minneapolis, and San Francisco now sell faster commutes-while carpoolers still ride free, paying customers in express lanes zip along at 60-65 mph while regular lanes crawl at 15-20 mph. Critics call these "Lexus lanes," arguing they add to affluence's advantages while relegating the poor to crawling traffic.
When you can't buy your way to the front, you can often hire someone to queue for you. In Washington D.C., line-standing has become institutionalized. Companies hire retirees, couriers, and homeless people at $10-20 hourly to hold places in congressional hearing lines, then charge lobbyists $36-60 hourly (often totaling $1,000+ per hearing). Shortly before hearings begin, well-dressed lobbyists replace their scruffily attired stand-ins. Senator Claire McCaskill has unsuccessfully tried banning this practice, calling it "offensive" that special interests can "buy seats like concert tickets." The business has even expanded to Supreme Court oral arguments.
In healthcare, queue-jumping takes various forms. Beijing hospital appointment scalpers exploit overwhelming demand at major facilities by hiring people to secure appointments, then reselling them for hundreds of dollars-often exceeding a peasant's monthly income. They hawk appointments to top specialists like sports tickets: "Dr. Tang. Who wants a ticket for Dr. Tang? Rheumatology and immunology."
In America, "concierge medicine" offers premium care with annual fees ranging from $1,500 to $25,000. For this price, patients receive same-day appointments, no waiting, leisurely consultations, and 24/7 access to their doctor via email and cell phone. Elite services like MD2 ($15,000 per year) limit doctors to just fifty families, offering "absolute, unlimited and exclusive access" in offices resembling luxury hotels. The drawback is obvious: concierge care for a few depends on shifting everyone else onto other doctors' already crowded schedules.
From airports to doctor's offices, the traditional ethic of "first come, first-served" is increasingly displaced by the market principle of "you get what you pay for"-reflecting money's growing reach into spheres once governed by non-market norms.
Chapter 4
The Moral Complexities of Queue-Jumping
What justifies the traditional queue ethic? When Shakespeare in the Park's spokesperson argues that paid line-standers "take a spot away from someone who wants to be there," the reasoning is flawed-line-standers don't reduce audience numbers, they just change who attends.
The stronger argument concerns fairness: ticket scalping disadvantages those who can't afford premium prices. When a line-stander gets a ticket, someone behind them loses out-someone who may be unable to afford the scalper's price.
Free-market advocates argue that willingness to pay indicates who values the experience most. But this reasoning fails because market prices reflect ability to pay, not just desire. The people in expensive ballpark seats often arrive late and leave early, while passionate fans who know every player's stats sit in cheaper sections. Sometimes, willingness to wait in line better indicates genuine interest than willingness to pay.
Beyond fairness concerns, how we allocate goods affects their essential nature. The Public Theater offers free Shakespeare as a civic gift, a public festival. Charging admission or allowing scalping transforms this communal celebration into a mere commodity. Similarly, paid line-standing for congressional hearings corrupts the meaning of representative government. Corruption here doesn't just mean bribes, but degrading something by subjecting it to inappropriate valuation.
Whether market allocation is appropriate depends on what kind of good is being valued and how it should be valued. When scalpers resold $20 Yosemite campsites for $100-$150, public outrage followed. While market logic suggests this efficiently allocates campsites to those valuing them most, the objections were twofold: it's unfair to people of modest means, and it inappropriately commodifies natural wonders. National parks aren't merely sources of utility but places of natural beauty deserving reverence-"Is nothing sacred?" asked one editorial.
Similarly, when Pope Benedict XVI visited America and scalpers sold free tickets to his masses online (one for over $200), church officials objected: "You can't pay to celebrate a sacrament." Though technically possible, selling access to religious rituals taints their sacred nature.
Bruce Springsteen deliberately prices concert tickets below market value ($95 versus potential $450), forgoing millions in revenue to maintain accessibility for working-class fans and preserve the concert's nature as partly commercial, partly communal celebration. As economist Alan Krueger noted, "concerts are social events" and "more like a party than a commodities market."
Markets and queues represent different allocation systems with different underlying ethics. "First come, first served" has egalitarian appeal, ignoring privilege and wealth. This principle seems appropriate for playgrounds, bus stops, and public restrooms. But not all activities should be governed by queuing. When selling a house, we're not obligated to accept the first offer.
Beyond markets and queues, we distribute some goods by merit (university admissions), others by need (emergency rooms), and still others by lottery (jury duty). The pervasive displacement of queues by markets has happened so rapidly that practices unimaginable thirty years ago-paid queue-jumping at airports, amusement parks, and national parks-now seem commonplace.
Chapter 5
When Money Motivates: The Power and Pitfalls of Incentives
Modern economics has expanded beyond traditional material concerns to become a comprehensive theory of human behavior. Gary Becker argues that all human decisions-from marriage to education to criminal activity-can be explained by individuals maximizing their welfare through cost-benefit calculations.
This "economic approach" applies to all domains of life, treating everything as having a price, whether explicit or implicit. Becker claims this framework explains all human behavior "relentlessly and unflinchingly," regardless of whether people consciously understand their decisions as economic calculations.
Barbara Harris's Project Prevention offers drug-addicted women $300 to undergo sterilization or long-term birth control. Since 1997, over three thousand women have accepted this offer, which Harris defends as preventing suffering among children born to addicts. Critics call it "morally reprehensible" and "a bribe for sterilization," arguing it coerces vulnerable women and degrades their reproductive capacity into a commodity.
The controversy highlights two distinct moral objections to market transactions: coercion (whether addicts can truly make free choices when desperate for money) and corruption (whether certain human capacities should be bought and sold at all).
School districts across America are increasingly using cash incentives to improve academic performance. Harvard economist Roland Fryer tested this approach in urban schools, distributing $6.3 million to students in predominantly low-income African American and Hispanic communities. Different cities used different payment schemes: New York paid for test scores, Washington D.C. rewarded attendance and homework, Chicago paid for good grades, and Dallas gave second-graders $2 per book read.
Results were mixed-New York saw no improvement in test scores, Chicago had better attendance but no test improvements, Washington showed some reading score gains for specific groups, while Dallas's book payment program yielded the best results with improved reading comprehension.
Cash incentives for health behaviors raise moral questions despite their practical benefits. While they may seem like bribes, health incentives differ from sterilization payments because they encourage behaviors in the recipient's interest rather than against it. However, they remain problematic because monetary motives can crowd out better ones.
Health bribes are manipulative-they bypass persuasion and substitute external motivation for intrinsic care about one's well-being. They trick people into doing what they should do anyway, but for the wrong reasons. This matters because proper concern for health is part of self-respect, and without developing the right attitudes, behavioral changes often don't last.
Research confirms this concern: even in the most successful smoking cessation programs, over 90% of participants resumed smoking six months after incentives ended. Cash works better for one-time actions like showing up for appointments than for changing long-term habits.
Chapter 6
How Markets Change the Nature of What They Touch
Markets leave their mark on social norms, often eroding non-market values. A study of Israeli childcare centers demonstrated this when fines for late pickups actually increased tardiness-parents reframed the fine as a fee for extended service rather than a moral penalty.
This highlights the crucial distinction between fines and fees. Fines register moral disapproval while fees are simply prices with no moral judgment. When wealthy people treat fines as fees-like tossing beer cans into the Grand Canyon or parking in disabled spaces-they misunderstand their purpose. They're not just paying for convenience but flouting community norms.
China's one-child policy illustrates the moral stakes of the fine-versus-fee distinction. The hefty 200,000 yuan ($31,000) penalty for having additional children has become merely a price tag for wealthy families who can easily afford it. One couple in Guangzhou reportedly "strutted in" to the birth control office, tossed down the money and demanded not to be disturbed about their future baby.
Alarmed that the rich treat this moral sanction as a simple fee, authorities have sought to restore its punitive nature by increasing fines for the affluent, banning violating celebrities from television appearances, and denying government contracts to offending executives.
The fine-versus-fee distinction extends to environmental policy. Should we fine companies exceeding emission limits or create tradable pollution permits? The latter approach treats pollution not as a moral wrong but as a business cost-but is this appropriate? The question requires more than cost-benefit analysis; we must decide what attitudes toward the environment we want to promote.
Carbon offsets represent a well-intentioned approach: pricing environmental damage and paying to remedy it. While supporting reforestation and clean energy projects is laudable, offsets risk becoming moral absolution mechanisms that discourage deeper lifestyle changes needed to address climate change.
Critics compare carbon offsets to medieval indulgences-monetary payments to atone for sins. The parody website cheatneutral.com illustrates this by offering "infidelity offsets" where cheaters pay faithful people to balance their moral ledger. Though the analogy isn't perfect (carbon emissions aren't inherently wrong, only harmful in aggregate), it highlights how commodifying environmental responsibility can undermine moral norms.
When Africa's black rhino population plummeted from 65,000 to under 2,500 between 1970-1992, conservationists tried a market solution. South Africa began allowing wealthy hunters to pay $150,000 for the right to hunt a limited number of black rhinos, creating financial incentives for private ranchers to breed and protect these animals.
The market approach appears effective: while Kenya's rhino population continues declining under hunting bans, South Africa's is rebounding as ranchers dedicate land to wildlife conservation. From an economic perspective, this creates a win-win scenario-ranchers profit, hunters enjoy their sport, and an endangered species recovers.
But this solution forces us to confront uncomfortable moral questions about trophy hunting itself. Is killing wildlife for sport inherently objectionable? If so, saving rhinos through hunting licenses becomes a devil's bargain-achieving conservation by catering to what some consider perverse pleasures of wealthy hunters.
Chapter 7
The Crowding Out Effect: When Markets Displace Morals
Some things inherently resist marketization. Friendship cannot be genuinely purchased - hired companions aren't true friends because the monetary transaction dissolves the authentic relationship. Similarly, honorific goods like Nobel Prizes or sports MVP awards lose their essential value when bought rather than earned. While one might purchase the physical trophy (as Michael Jackson did with the Gone with the Wind Oscar for $1.54 million), the actual honor cannot be transferred through market exchange.
The innocent tradition of fans seeking player autographs has morphed into a billion-dollar memorabilia industry. Where players once freely signed scorecards and baseballs for young fans, today's autograph market is dominated by brokers, wholesalers, and the teams themselves. Mickey Mantle earned $2.75 million in 1992 for autographing twenty thousand baseballs-more than his entire Yankees playing career.
Can meaningful expressions of contrition or affection be outsourced? The Tianjin Apology company in China offers professional apologizers who say "sorry for you" - but a purchased apology likely fails to convey genuine contrition. Similarly, websites like ThePerfectToast.com sell custom wedding speeches for $149, while budget options offer pre-written toasts for $19.95. Yet a discovered ghost-written toast loses its emotional power, as its value derives from the authentic expression of friendship.
Economists struggle with gift-giving as a rational practice. Joel Waldfogel argues that gifts destroy value - we value items received as gifts 20% less than things we buy ourselves, amounting to $13 billion in "value destruction" annually in America. Economic logic suggests cash would maximize recipient welfare. But this misses the point: gifts aren't merely about utility maximization but about expression and connection. A thoughtful gift engages with the recipient's identity in ways cash cannot.
Standard economic reasoning assumes that commodifying a good doesn't alter its character - that market exchanges increase efficiency without changing the goods themselves. But growing evidence contradicts this assumption. Markets reaching into spheres traditionally governed by nonmarket norms can backfire by crowding out those norms. Sometimes, offering payment for a behavior gets you less of it, not more.
When economists surveyed residents of Wolfenschiessen, Switzerland about hosting a nuclear waste repository, 51 percent agreed to accept it out of civic duty. But when offered annual monetary compensation, support plummeted to 25 percent - even when payments reached $8,700 per person. The villagers viewed the financial incentive as a bribe that transformed a civic question into a pecuniary one.
In another experiment, Israeli high school students collecting charitable donations raised more money when working as unpaid volunteers than when offered commissions (either 1% or 10%). Paying students transformed a civic duty into a job for pay, dampening their moral commitment.
Richard Titmuss's classic 1970 study compared blood collection systems in the UK (all voluntary donations) and the US (mix of donations and commercial blood banks). He found that, contrary to market efficiency claims, the American system led to chronic shortages, waste, higher costs, and greater contamination risks. The market in blood undermined the "gift relationship" as an essential social feature, with broader implications for moral life.
Chapter 8
Markets in Life and Death
When Michael Rice, a Walmart assistant manager, died of a heart attack, the $300,000 insurance payout went not to his family but to Walmart, which had secretly taken out a policy on his life. His outraged widow sued, arguing corporations shouldn't profit from employee deaths. Walmart defended itself by claiming the payout merely compensated for training costs and replacement expenses.
Corporate-owned life insurance on ordinary employees - nicknamed "janitors insurance" or "dead peasants insurance" - became widespread in the 1980s after insurance industry lobbying relaxed state laws. Major corporations including Walmart, AT&T, Disney, and numerous banks invested billions in these policies, attracted by tax advantages that made death benefits and investment income tax-free. Most workers remained unaware their employers had put a price on their heads, as companies could collect even after employees left the company. By 2008, U.S. banks alone held $122 billion in such policies.
The viatical industry emerged during the AIDS epidemic, creating a market where investors purchased life insurance policies from terminally ill people at a discount. A person with a $100,000 policy might sell it for $50,000 to access immediate cash for medical care or living expenses. While seemingly beneficial for both parties, this arrangement created a disturbing moral complication: investors profited most when the policyholder died quickly.
When AIDS treatments improved in the 1990s, viatical brokers faced a problem: people weren't dying as quickly as investors expected. Looking for more reliable deaths to invest in, they expanded beyond terminal illnesses to buying policies from healthy senior citizens. Alan Buerger pioneered this "life settlement" industry after his "lightning strike" insight that wealthy seniors offered a more promising market than AIDS patients.
The final evolution of the death betting market came when Wall Street began securitizing life settlements. By 2009, investment banks were packaging life insurance policies into bonds to be sold to pension funds and institutional investors, creating what became known as "death bonds." Goldman Sachs developed a tradable index of life settlements, while Credit Suisse created "a financial assembly line" to buy, package and resell policies-mimicking the subprime mortgage securities model.
To minimize risk, these bonds bundled policies on people with diverse ailments-"leukemia, lung cancer, heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's"-ensuring that a cure for any single disease wouldn't tank the bond's value. The fundamental moral problem remains: these financial instruments create a class of investors whose returns improve when public health deteriorates.
Chapter 9
The Commercialization of Everything
Since the 1990s, commercial advertising has colonized virtually every corner of life. From a Russian rocket emblazoned with a Pizza Hut logo to laser-etched ads on eggs, marketers have found increasingly intrusive ways to capture attention. Video screens now target captive audiences at elevators, ATMs, and gas pumps. Even bathroom walls have become prime advertising real estate, with major companies replacing illicit escort service stickers with slick ads for deodorants and video games-creating a $50 million industry with its own trade association.
Stadium naming rights represent another commercialization of baseball. Historic venues like Chicago's Comiskey Park (now U.S. Cellular Field) and countless others have been renamed for corporate sponsors. By 2011, most major league teams played in corporate-branded stadiums, with deals like Citigroup's $400 million twenty-year naming rights for the Mets' stadium.
Sports stadiums once functioned as cathedrals of civil religion-public spaces gathering people from all walks of life in shared ritual. But as professional sports has become more business-focused, money has crowded out community. The skybox trend that began with the Dallas Cowboys in the 1970s has destroyed this class-mixing aspect of sports. These luxury suites-described as "the sporting equivalent of gated communities"-now generate nearly 40% of ticket revenue for some teams despite comprising a small fraction of seats.
The trend of municipal marketing emerged in the 1990s as financially pressed cities sought corporate sponsorships for public services. It began with Skippy Peanut Butter imprinting 5,000 logos on a New Jersey beach, and Chevrolet sponsoring Orange County beach rescues with branded vehicles. Transit authorities have increasingly sold naming rights to historic stations. New York's MTA sold Barclays Bank naming rights to a busy Brooklyn subway station for $4 million over twenty years, while Philadelphia renamed Pattison station (named for a 19th-century governor) to AT&T Station for $3.4 million.
Even our most fundamental civic institutions have succumbed to advertising's invasion. In 2011, Erie County's Buffalo jail began running bail bondsmen and defense lawyer ads on screens visible to newly arrested defendants-the "ultimate captive audience." Meanwhile, classrooms nationwide have become prime marketing territory. Channel One, launched in 1989, provided schools with free equipment in exchange for requiring students to watch a daily news program with two minutes of unskippable commercials.
Chapter 10
The Skyboxification of American Life
Commercialism doesn't destroy everything it touches-a KFC-branded fire hydrant still douses flames, and fans still cheer in corporate-named stadiums. Yet imprinting things with logos fundamentally changes their meaning and character. Product placement corrupts the author-reader relationship; body advertising objectifies people; classroom commercials undermine education's purpose.
These judgments involve contested values about the meaning of books, bodies, schools, and other domains markets have invaded. But that's precisely the point: once we recognize that markets transform the goods they touch, we must deliberate about where markets belong and where they don't. This requires engaging with competing visions of the good life-moral and spiritual questions our public discourse has largely avoided during these decades of market triumphalism.
Beyond specific goods, commercialism erodes commonality itself. As naming rights and marketing appropriate the public sphere, they diminish its shared character. The skyboxes at ballparks exemplify this "skyboxification of American life"-where affluent and modest-means citizens increasingly lead separate lives, inhabiting different spaces for living, working, shopping, playing, and schooling.
This separation undermines democracy, which doesn't require perfect equality but does require citizens sharing a common life. Democracy depends on people of different backgrounds encountering one another in everyday life-these interactions teach us to negotiate differences and cultivate concern for the common good.
Two fundamental arguments against marketization recur across various domains: the fairness objection and the corruption objection. The fairness objection questions whether market exchanges are truly voluntary when conducted under conditions of inequality or economic necessity-as when a desperate person sells a kidney to feed their family. The corruption objection, by contrast, concerns how market valuation degrades certain goods and practices regardless of bargaining conditions.
Economist Kenneth Arrow challenged critics by invoking two key tenets of market thinking. First, commercializing an activity doesn't change it-money never corrupts, and market relations never crowd out nonmarket norms. Second, ethical behavior is a commodity that needs economizing-altruism and generosity are scarce resources depleted with use. These assumptions, though rarely defended, underpin economists' faith in extending markets into every aspect of life.
But this economistic view of virtue misleadingly treats moral qualities like commodities depleted with use, when they actually function more like muscles that grow stronger through exercise. A market-driven society's defect is letting these virtues languish when we need to exercise them more strenuously.
The question of markets is ultimately about how we want to live together: Do we want a society where everything is for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets cannot honor and money should not buy?
