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In the past few years we have moved from having a market economy to living in a market society, in which just about everything is up for sale.
I am fortunate to have enough money not to have to worry about the necessities of life. Beyond that I try to think about money as little as possible.
I grew up in a Jewish family, and we have raised our children in a Jewish tradition. Religion gives a framework for moral enquiry in young minds and points us to questions beyond the material.
If you pay a child a dollar to read a book, as some schools have tried, you not only create an expectation that reading makes you money, you also run the risk of depriving the child for ever of the value of it. Markets are not innocent.
I almost became a political journalist, having worked as a reporter at the time of Watergate. The proximity to those events motivated me, when I wound up doing philosophy, to try to use it to move the public debate.
Philosophy can be debilitating. It demands a critical sensibility, and to try to apply that to everything can be a very disquieting thing – the disquiet is necessary, even if you are unmoored by it.
Change has to take root in people's minds before it can be legislated. My faith in the reversibility of the idea that everything is up for sale is challenged every day. But against that is real hunger for some other way of organising things.
As the gap between rich and poor has grown, the ability for an individual to rise in society is at a lower level than at any time in living memory.
There are far fewer public spaces that draw us together. When I used to go to baseball as a kid, part of the excitement was in the commonality of the experience, the fact that all kinds of people were sitting in the stadium. The pleasure of sports has been decreased by its commerciality.
We wanted to send our children to a state school because we wanted them to mix with a range of kids, and we were lucky enough to buy a house in an area with excellent schools. It is now increasingly expensive to do that.
When the banking crisis happened, the notion that we could trust everything to markets seemed to have run its course. The most surprising outcome was that we wanted to try to restore the same trust as quickly as possible.
I try not to get into questions of whether morality is hardwired in our brains.
You only have to look at the opportunities technology extends for sharing ideas and learning, to see it is as more a force of good than otherwise.
Economics wants to present itself as a value-free science. And there is an allure to that idea, but it is impossible to defend.
What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael Sandel is published by Penguin on 7 May at £9.99. To order a copy for £7.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846
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