Michael Sandel: What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

1.How does Michael Sandel support the thesis that "over the past three decades we have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society?

He supports that thesis making an example about education, because in the field of education nowadays society wants to buy motivation and knowledge in students, and those are things that do should not have a price. We have a market society because society not only wants to buy products, but also values.

2. What sorts of arguments are offered for and against the assumed proposal of paying young children two dollars for every book they read?

arguments for say that students start reading because they are getting money, but time after it will become a habit and students will read for themselves.

arguments against say that when you start reading because someone is paying you, you will not love it because you do not have the real desire to read for yourself, so you will read for love of money and not because you love reading.

3.Now, what is your standpoint about cash incentives at school or at home to encourage students to read more books?

I personally think that the lack of reading is a great problem specially in Colombia and could be a good strategy paying to those who read books for encourage reading, however you cannot buy the love that someone has to the lecture, you cannot buy habits, so at the moment when you stop paying someone for reading, that person will stop reading.

4. When Michael Sandel contends that "this tendency of markets and cash incentives of crowding out non-market goods, higher goods, can be seen in may spheres of social life, what sort of "higher goods" do you think he is referring to?

I think that with higher goods he is referring to the insights of people, their way of thinking, what is the most important good that someone has.

5.What kind of non-material goods do you think have been crowded out by market transactions in Colombia?

I think that non-materials goods that in Colombia have been crowded out by market transactions are relationships, because we can see how people easily let himself be influenced by money, no matter love or empathy.

6.  What should be the role of money and markets in our Colombian society?

The role that should play money and markets in Colombia should be just to buy material goods, and not to buy non material goods.