Beware the intrusion of the market Thinker: Michael Sandel wants to challenge us. Photo: Stephanie Mitchell Is there anything wrong with a free market in human kidneys? Why shouldn't a woman rent her womb to the highest bidder for a surrogate pregnancy? What's the problem with schools paying reluctant kids to read books; or with wealthy inmates paying for an upgrade to a better prison cell? What about the $US30 billion trade in life insurance policies, in which investors bet on strangers dying sooner rather than later so they can cash in? Michael Sandel, a political philosopher and professor at Harvard University, wants everyone to ask these questions. They are not hypotheticals - the examples he draws on in his latest book, What Money Can't Buy - The Moral Limits of Markets, are happening now in the US and around the world. He worries that three decades of "market triumphalism" have turned western countries from societies with a market economy into market societies, where literally everything has a price. "The difference is this: a market economy is a valuable and effective tool for organising productive activity," he says. But a market society is a place where everything is up for sale. It's a way of life in which market values reach into every domain, from family life and personal relations to health, education, criminal justice, military service and civic life. That's my worry. Sandel's is a lonely voice against the reign of economic rationalism. It is perhaps little wonder that Sandel, whose famous undergraduate course "Justice" at Harvard is one of the most popular in the institution's history, was quietly asked by his college economics professor never to publicly reveal who taught him economics. The global financial crisis in 2008 challenged the infallibility of markets, but not the central role markets and money have been given in our society. Sandel argues it is time for a public debate about where society draws the line on what is, and isn't, a tradeable commodity. "Market thinking has a hold on the public imagination because markets seem to be a neutral way of deciding ethically fraught questions in public life," he says. But that's a spurious appeal, I don't think markets truly are neutral ways of deciding contested questions in public life that involve conflicted values. One problem of applying a market ethic to everything is the unfairness it creates: the rich can afford better service and the poor are pushed to the back of the queue. There is also the question of whether, say, the impoverished Indian peasant selling a kidney to a wealthier westerner is truly acting freely, or out of economic coercion, Sandel says. But it's also important to have the philosophical debate of whether a human should be commodified as a package of valuable spare parts for sale. Sandel is speaking at the Sydney Writers' Festival next week.