Should we financially reward children for good marks? Is it ethical to pay people to donate organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons or selling citizenship? In this title, the author asks: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale?

In which the book's central idea is set forth: namely, if morality represents howpeople would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually doeswork.Why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong...How "experts"-fromcriminologists to real-estate agents to political scientists-bend the facts...Whyknowing what to measure, and how to measure it, is the key to understandingmodern life...