What can't money buy?

In this episode of Crossing Channels, Anna Alexandrova and Léo Fitouchi talk to Richard Westcott about the limits of markets and what happens when economic reasoning meets moral values. 

They explore why some things – such as dignity, fairness and trust – sit uneasily with prices, and how attempts to measure wellbeing can reshape what societies consider valuable. 

The conversation also examines how monetary incentives sometimes crowd out moral motivations, why people react strongly to the idea that certain goods should be for sale, and what this means for policymakers trying to design fair and legitimate institutions in a world where not everything that matters can be priced.

Listen on your preferred podcast platform

Season 5 Episode 5 transcript: Word / PDF

For more information about the Crossing Channels podcast series and the work of the Bennett School of Public Policy and IAST visit our websites at https://www.bennettschool.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/.

With thanks to:

• Audio production by Alice Whaley
• Associate production by Burcu Sevde Selvi
• Visuals by Tiffany Naylor and Pauline Alves

More information about our host and guests:

Guest speakers

Anna Alexandrova is a Professor in Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge. She researches how formal tools such as models and indicators enable scientists to navigate complex phenomena tinged with ethical and political dimensions. Her book A Philosophy for the Science of Wellbeing came out with Oxford University Press in 2017 and won the 2022 Gittler Book Prize of the American Philosophical Association. 

Léo Fitouchi is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) and Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences of the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE). His research investigates the evolved mechanisms of moral cognition and how they shape the cultural evolution of moral norms, religious traditions, and punitive institutions across human societies. He tackles those questions by integrating insights from the social, cognitive, and evolutionary sciences, and testing predictions of the accounts he proposes by means of psychological experiments and cross-cultural databases. He received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris before joining the IAST.

Podcast host

Richard Westcott is an award-winning journalist who spent 27 years at the BBC as a correspondent/producer/presenter covering global stories for the flagship Six and Ten o’clock TV news as well as the Today programme. Last year, Richard left the corporation and he is now the communications director for Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, both organisations that are working to support life sciences and healthcare across the city.