If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- How did introducing a financial fine for late pickups at an Israeli child-care center actually cause more parents to arrive late, and what does this reveal about how money irrevocably replaces our moral norms?
- If paying female drug addicts to get sterilized successfully reduces the number of drug-addicted babies born, why might this highly effective market-based solution still be morally dangerous for society?
- Is human altruism a scarce, finite resource that should be conserved through financial incentives, or is it a virtuous capacity that grows stronger the more it is exercised?
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Key Takeaways from What Money Can't Buy
- Understand how market thinking has silently expanded beyond the economy and into everyday social spheres like education, healthcare, and public security.
- Discover why turning everyday aspects of life into purchasable commodities deepens social inequality and can coerce marginalized individuals into degrading financial exchanges.
- Learn why assigning a monetary value to civic goods, like charging for public celebrations, fundamentally corrupts their intended social meaning and shared values.
- Find out how introducing financial incentives for good behavior, such as paying children to write thank-you notes, irrevocably replaces moral lessons with transactional business norms.
- Evaluate the extreme moral limits of free-market efficiency by exploring controversial, real-world practices like paying female drug addicts to undergo sterilization.
What Money Can't Buy — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: Market thinking has quietly spread into nearly every realm of social life, posing a challenge for society today.
Chapter 3: The ascendancy of market thinking carries significant implications for social justice.
Chapter 4: Though market thinking can effectively guide people’s behavior, not everything ought to be bought and sold today.
Chapter 5: Bringing market norms into new realms can cause unintended, unfortunate, and very serious irreversible consequences.
Chapter 6: Economists remain insufficiently attuned to the moral questions market thinking raises today.
Chapter 7: Contrary to economic theory, altruism should be nurtured so people can expand their capacity for it.
Chapter 8: We must judge, case by case, whether the benefits of market-thinking–inspired policies outweigh the moral concerns we face.
Chapter 9: We need a robust public debate on where market thinking belongs in our society today.
What Money Can't Buy Summary & Overview
The blinks to What Money Can´t Buy (2013) explain how market-driven thinking – like the introduction of incentives and making everything available for a price – has snuck into almost every sphere of our lives. This means we are often suddenly confronted by serious moral concerns when market morality manifests itself in an area where it doesn’t belong.
Who Should Listen to What Money Can't Buy?
- Anyone interested in economics, morality and the way they intersect
- Anyone interested in a critique of the market-driven thinking that has gone unquestioned for three decades
- Anyone who has a view on what kind of society they want to live in
- Anyone who believes everything should be for sale
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