Narrator: In Tilton, New Hampshire, a 48-year-old Walmart assistant manager named Michael Rice suffered a fatal heart attack while helping a customer. His wife, Vicki, was devastated. Her grief, however, soon turned to shock and outrage. She discovered that Walmart held a life insurance policy on her husband and, upon his death, the company—not his family—collected a payout of $300,000. This practice, known grimly as "janitors insurance," is not an isolated incident. By the late 2000s, major corporations and banks held billions of dollars in life insurance on their rank-and-file employees, often without their knowledge. This raises a deeply unsettling question: When did human life become a corporate asset?

This disturbing reality is the entry point into the world explored by philosopher Michael J. Sandel in his book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Sandel argues that over the last few decades, we have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society. The difference is profound. A market economy is a tool for organizing productive activity, but a market society is a place where almost everything is up for sale, and market values seep into every aspect of human life, from healthcare and education to civic life and even death.

Narrator: The ethic of the queue—"first come, first served"—was once a great equalizer. It’s a simple principle of fairness that ignores wealth and status. Yet, in the modern market society, the queue is becoming a relic. Today, for the right price, you can buy your way to the front. At popular amusement parks, a "Front of Line" pass, often costing double the standard admission, allows the wealthy to bypass the long waits that define the experience for everyone else. On congested freeways, what were once carpool lanes have become toll lanes, derisively nicknamed "Lexus lanes," allowing those who can afford it to purchase a faster commute.

This trend extends into far more critical domains. In Washington D.C., lobbyists who want to attend a congressional hearing don't wait in line overnight. They hire line-standing companies, which in turn often employ homeless individuals to hold a place for them. In some Chinese hospitals, a desperate market for medical care has emerged where scalpers buy up appointment tickets and resell them for exorbitant prices to patients who can pay to skip the days-long queues. Sandel argues that these examples are not just isolated cases of convenience; they are symptoms of a larger shift. We are moving away from a society where money grants access to luxuries and toward one where it buys the necessities of a good life, including access to healthcare, political influence, and even the basic experience of public spaces.

Narrator: Sandel presents two central arguments against letting markets dominate all aspects of life. The first is the fairness objection. In a society where everything is for sale, life becomes significantly harder for those with limited financial means. When advantages like better medical care, superior education, or political influence can be bought, inequality deepens. The "skyboxification" of life, as Sandel calls it, means the affluent and the poor live increasingly separate lives, eroding the shared experiences that foster a sense of community.

The second, and more subtle, argument is the corruption objection. This argument holds that putting a price on certain goods and social practices can degrade or corrupt them. Markets don't just allocate goods; they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged. For example, some school districts have experimented with paying students for reading books or getting good grades. While the goal is to improve academic performance, Sandel questions the lesson it teaches. Does it cultivate a love of learning, or does it teach students to view reading as a chore done for pay? The incentive may change the behavior, but it corrupts the intrinsic value of the activity itself. This corruption objection forces us to ask not just about fairness, but about the meaning and purpose of social goods and whether they are harmed by being treated as commodities.

Narrator: Standard economic theory often assumes that introducing a monetary incentive will simply add to, not replace, a person's existing motivations. Sandel shows this is often wrong. In many cases, market incentives can "crowd out" non-market norms like civic duty, altruism, and moral obligation. A famous study in Switzerland provides a stark illustration. When residents of a small village were asked if they would accept a nuclear waste facility in their community, 51% agreed, viewing it as a civic responsibility. Then, the economists offered a sweetener: an annual payment to each resident for accepting the site. With the introduction of money, support plummeted to just 25%.

The offer of payment changed the question from "What is our duty as citizens?" to "Is the money worth the risk?" The financial incentive didn't supplement their civic spirit; it displaced it. A similar phenomenon was observed at Israeli daycare centers that introduced a fine for parents who picked up their children late. Instead of discouraging lateness, it increased. Parents began to treat the fine not as a penalty for inconsiderate behavior, but as a fee for a service—the right to be late. Once a moral obligation is replaced by a market transaction, it is very difficult to restore.

Narrator: The logic of the market society reaches its most disturbing conclusion when it is applied to human life and death. The book explores the rise of "viatical settlements," a market where investors buy the life insurance policies of the terminally ill, typically AIDS patients in the 1990s. The investors pay the person a discounted cash sum, take over the premium payments, and collect the full death benefit when the person dies. The sooner the person dies, the higher the investor's return. This creates a grotesque financial incentive: investors are literally betting on death. One man with AIDS, whose health unexpectedly improved thanks to new drugs, described being hounded by his investor, saying, "I’ve never felt like anybody wanted me dead before."

This commodification of mortality has since expanded. Wall Street created "death bonds," securities backed by bundles of life insurance policies sold by the elderly. Investors can now bet on the longevity of strangers. Even the U.S. government briefly considered a "terrorism futures market," where traders could bet on the likelihood of future terrorist attacks and political assassinations. The plan was scrapped after public outrage, but it reveals how far market logic can be pushed. Sandel argues that these markets are corrupting because they cultivate a callous and manipulative way of valuing human life, turning death into a source of financial speculation.

Narrator: The proliferation of luxury skyboxes in sports stadiums serves as a powerful metaphor for the broader social consequence of a market society. For generations, a ballpark was a place where people from all walks of life—CEOs and blue-collar workers, professors and plumbers—gathered together, sharing a common experience and civic identity. The advent of the skybox changed that. The affluent now watch the game from behind glass, separated from the common fan in the bleachers.

Sandel argues this "skyboxification" is happening across society. As money buys access to better schools, exclusive neighborhoods, and premium healthcare, the affluent and the poor cease to encounter one another in daily life. This segregation is corrosive to democracy. Democracy requires that we see ourselves as citizens in a shared enterprise, capable of reasoning together about the common good. When we live in separate worlds, our sense of shared fate and mutual responsibility withers. The more things money can buy, the less we have in common, and the harder it becomes to cultivate the virtues of citizenship.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from What Money Can’t Buy is that markets are not morally neutral instruments. They leave their mark on the social norms and values they govern. The central question is not about the efficiency of markets, but about the kind of society we want to create. By allowing market thinking to expand into every corner of our lives, we are not making a purely economic choice; we are making a moral choice about how we value goods like health, education, family, and civic life.

Ultimately, Sandel challenges us to reignite a public debate that has been silenced by the seemingly value-neutral language of economics. The problem, he concludes, is not greed, but the vacuity of our public discourse. We must ask ourselves a fundamental question: Are there certain things that money should not be able to buy? Answering that requires us to think critically about the moral meaning of goods and the proper way to value them, before we find ourselves in a society where everything has a price, but nothing has a soul.