Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsEverything has its price...
Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2020
What Money Can’t Buy, the well-written and thought provoking book by Harvard’s Professor Michael Sandel, is intended to encourage readers to think about the extent to which the economic mode of thinking and behaving has infiltrated modern society. He produces countless examples of market transactions (buying and selling) that have permeated ordinary life. Without explicitly thinking about, or desiring it, we have, almost overnight, become adherents to economist Gary Becker’s conviction that “everything we do can be explained by assuming that we calculate costs and benefits…” More often than not implicit, Becker claimed “shadow prices” were embedded in the alternatives we face and the tradeoffs we make.
The right to name a building, office, stadium and you-name-it in return for a monetary contribution has clearly infiltrated the halls (also for sale) of higher, and even K-12 education. From the standpoint of public education, Sandel argues that “Rather than raise the public funds to educate our children, we choose instead to sell their time and rent their minds to Burger King and Mountain Dew.” (Recall the fictional version of this in the novel, Infinite Jest, and its “year of the whopper, etc”.) The difficulty with this argument, however, is that it assumes there exists some level of taxation (school revenue) at which education administrators and others will have all the funding they need - a level of funds above which they would not pursue more. In theory such a “world” is possible, but it’s difficult to imagine that level of satisfaction could ever be reached. It’s rather akin to a comment once made about Harvard’s endowment; large as the endowment may be, there is, according to Harvard’s development office, no limit to how big it can get.
It’s difficult, in other words, to imagine a world in which prices are no longer attached to just about everything. That being said, Sandel has done readers a tremendous service by calling attention to an aspect of our lives that has, to date, gone largely unnoticed and unexplored.
