What Money Can't Buy Quotes

“A growing body of work in social psychology offers a possible explanation for this commercialization effect. These studies highlight the difference between intrinsic motivations (such as moral conviction or interest in the task at hand) and external ones (such as money or other tangible rewards). When people are engaged in an activity they consider intrinsically worthwhile, offering them money may weaken their motivation by depreciating or "crowding out" their intrinsic interest or commitment.”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“It isn't easy to teach students to be citizens, capable of thinking critically about the world around them, when so much of childhood consists of basic training for a consumer society.”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the state is not far from its fall.”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“Some see in our rancorous politics a surfeit of moral conviction: too many people believe too deeply, too stridently, in their own convictions and want to impose them on everyone else.”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to buy yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“How does the economist help? By promoting policies that rely, whenever possible, on self-interest rather than altruism or moral considerations, the economist saves society from squandering its scarce supply of virtue. “If we economists do [our] business well,” Robertson concludes, “we can, I believe, contribute mightily to the economizing … of that scarce resource Love,” the “most precious thing in the world.”49”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“Altruism, generosity, solidarity and civic spirit are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are more like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise. One of the defects of a market-driven society is that it lets these virtues languish. To renew our public life we need to exercise them more strenuously.”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“Consider inequality. In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money can buy, the more affluence (or the lack of it) matters.”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“Markets express and promote certain attitudes to the goods being exchanged.”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“prison cell upgrade: $82 per night.”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“Letting rich countries buy their way out of meaningful changes in their own wasteful habits reinforces a bad attitude—that nature is a dumping ground for those who can afford it.”
― Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“....we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. The difference is this: A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavour.”
― Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“Appearance of “incentivize” or “incentivise” in major newspapers67 1980s 48 1990s 449 2000s 6159 2010–11 5885”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“Some see in our rancorous politics a surfeit of moral conviction: too many people believe too deeply, too stridently, in their own convictions and want to impose them on everyone else. I think this misreads our predicament. The problem with our politics is not too much moral argument but too little. Our politics is overheated because it is mostly vacant, empty of moral and spiritual content. It fails to engage with big questions that people care about.”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“Aristotle taught that virtue is something we cultivate with practice: “we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”50 Rousseau held a similar view. The more a country asks of its citizens, the greater their devotion to it. “In a well-ordered city every man flies to the assemblies.” Under a bad government, no one participates in public life “because no one is interested in what happens there” and “domestic cares are all-absorbing.” Civic virtue is built up, not spent down, by strenuous citizenship. Use it or lose it, Rousseau says, in effect. “As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the state is not far from its fall.”51”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“Call center technology enables companies to “score” incoming calls and to give faster service to those that come from affluent places.”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“Whatever its effect on the autonomy of the child, the drive to banish contingency and to master the mystery of birth diminishes the designing parent and corrupts parenting as a social practice governed by norms of unconditional love. . . . Even if it does not harm the child or impair its autonomy, eugenic parenting is objectionable because it expresses and entrenches a certain stance toward the world—a stance of mastery and dominion that fails to appreciate the gifted character of human powers and achievements, and misses the part of freedom that consists in a persisting negotiation with the given.”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“financial crisis, something bigger is at stake. The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“People disagree about the meaning of books, bodies, and schools, and how they should be valued. In fact, we disagree about the norms appropriate to many of the domains that markets have invaded—family life, friendship, sex, procreation, health, education, nature, art, citizenship, sports and the way we contend with the prospect of death. But that's my point: once we see that markets and commerce change the character of the goods they touch, we have to ask where markets belong—and where they don't. And we can't answer this question without deliberating about the meaning and purpose of goods, and the values that should govern them. Such deliberations touch, unavoidably, on competing conceptions of the good life. This is terrain on which we sometimes fear to tread. For fear of disagreement, we hesitate to bring our moral and spiritual convictions into the public square. But shrinking from these questions does not leave them undecided. It simply means that markets will decide them for us.”
― Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“Most of our political debates today are conducted in these terms—between those who favour unfettered markets and those who maintain that market choices are free only when they're made on a level playing field, only when the basic terms of social cooperation are fair.”
― Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“[on the expressive value of giftgiving] From our intimates at least, we'd rather received a gift that speaks to "the wild self, the passionate self, the romantic self.”
― Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“Fines register moral disapproval, whereas fees are simply prices that imply no moral judgment.”
― Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“Part of the appeal of markets is that they don't pass judgment on the preferences they satisfy. They don't ask whether some ways of valuing goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If someone is willing to pay for sex or a kidney, and a consenting adult is willing to sell, the only question the economist asks is, "How much?" Markets don't wag fingers. They don't discriminate between admirable preferences and base ones. Each party to a deal decides for himself or herself what value to place on the things being exchanged. This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning and explains much of its appeal. But our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has exacted a heavy price: it has drained public discourse of moral and civic energy, and contributed to the technocratic, managerial politics that afflicts many societies today.”
― Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

“its fall.”
― Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets