We live in an era when virtually everything is up for sale—babies, permits to shoot endangered species, advertising space on student report cards, and even a baseball announcer’s message when a player hits a home run. In his lucid and provocative book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27), Harvard professor Michael J. Sandel, one of the world’s pre-eminent political scientists, assesses what happens to the common good when market values crowd out social and civic values. With eye-opening examples from everyday life, and some entertaining digs at well-known economists (including some of his colleagues and friends), he makes a persuasive and elegant case for how we can change the current scenario.
