What Money Can T Buy Michael Sandel

Morality is the belief of what is right behavior and what is wrong behavior. In today’s society, morality is put on the back burner. Michael Sandel is the author of What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets where he explores the lost of morality in today’s society and how markets are taking over morality. Moral judgement is being replaced with dollar signs and how much something cost is dictating if it’s morally right according to Sandel. Things like ticket scalping, paying kids to get good grades, and janitors insurance Sandel discusses in his book. Schools across the country are trying to boost their academic performance by paying students to get good grades, this questions if it will actually work, who does it benefit, and

This can be shown in my personal life in that teachers give out pre and post exams of their course material and have teacher evaluations to improve student learning but for some teachers that is not the goal they have. Some teachers get paid for the academic success of their students. School districts in Denver, New York City, and in Washington D.C. have implemented cash incentives for teachers and in 2006 Congress passed the Teacher Incentive Fund that provides pay-for performance grants to school teachers in lower performing schools (Sandel 53-54). There is no sizable impact of the students who their teachers get paid more because of their test scores. A Vanderbilt University study proved that teachers who were offered a bonus for improving test results produced no more improvement than the control group (Tying). A good teacher can not be determine by how much they get paid, a good teacher should be determine by other variables involved. The way for the incentives to work will not be by increasing the pay of the teachers but rather than create a different atmosphere for the students and changing the attitudes towards

Sandel mentions in the book the idea that bribery will sometimes work in certain areas and sometimes it’s the best way to go about a situation. This situation could be if paying kids to read more books means higher reading comprehension score, then it should the first option and teach kids to learn to love reading later. But the bribery we engage in can substitute the lower norm for a higher norm and it causes us to compromise the morality of reading for fun and reading for cash (Sandel 78). The morality of paying students to read and good grades is ruining the satisfaction of reading a book for the fun of it or getting a good grade after studying hard for a test; causing it to be priceless. Sandel questions the act of promising economic growth or economic efficiency which means that it’s putting a price on something we claim as priceless. This causes us sometimes to be torn between to traffic the moral question or let markets take over to achieve the worthy ends (Sandel 78). Paying students to read or get good grades might get them to read more, but it will also teach them that reading is a chore rather than a source of satisfaction (Sandel