Book Review: What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel

In this world of ours, we can buy almost everything. You can buy a separate cozy prison cell if you are rich enough. You can shoot an extinct rhino for the right kind of money, and you can purchase a homeless to queue for you to Congress so you can lobby your agendas. Sandel looks at our systems and argues that money corrupts the meaning of an act, that there shouldn’t be a price for everything, and that not every deed and act should be able to be bought.

The book’s premise is sound, and Sandel is doing a good thing here by opening a public debate about what will happen if we, as a society, attach a price tag to everything. He makes his arguments through moral theory and science papers about the effects of money on behavior. Still, while I appreciate the sentiment, the arguments are shallow, and the book is scattered and only scratches the surface of the issues. For example, he introduces the concept of whether it is right to pay 300 dollars for drug addict women to sterilize themselves; he just quickly goes over the issue of freedom of choice, and that’s about it. Sandel promises to return to the issue after introducing it, but he never does. He doesn’t even dig deeper into why someone thinks such a deed is a good idea.

As an occupational therapist, I work with children with developmental issues and children being addicted at birth and their development stifled in the uterus, it’s a tough moral choice to choose between the freedom of fertility and the consequences of drug-influenced births. Also, I have talked with a lot of foster care workers, and the reality of children birthed to drug-addicted parents isn’t pretty. The grim fact is that, unfortunately, those children are being sold for sexual favors to support drug addiction. I saw this same thing as I did a rotation at a prison hospital with both female and male offenders (open and closed wards.) It’s a terrifying world of being a drug-addicted female. You don’t have human value in the male-centered drug world. You are a thing to be used, sold, and abused. Most of the women, even in their forties, are developmentally around 12-13 years old because their abuse has started so early, probably at home. They are traumatized and used and discarded, and they have gotten used to being non-humans. The glamorous pictures they show on TV shows and movies of female prisoners distort the public’s perspective.

Unfortunately, while I appreciated the theme of the book and what it tries to do, it’s still a shallow book to give us a real perspective on the moral issues: the limits of money. Sandel spends more time arguing why buying someone to queue for you is wrong than the issue of drug-addicted women being bought to sterilize themselves. Okay, I feel strongly about the issue, having seen what it means on an individual level. Still, I cannot say anything about what would be the right call in a purely objective world: to pay or not to pay. But what gets me angry is that Sandel doesn’t even give time for the argument.

Thank you for reading ❤ Have a magical day!