I’m writing a review of Ruth Grant’s Strings Attached for Public Choice. (The book concerns the ethics of incentives. It asks: Under what conditions is it right or wrong for different people or agencies to offer extrinsic benefits in order to induce behavior from others?)

This isn’t just another book on what should and should not be commodified, though it does cover that topic to some extent.

Sometimes, if you know an author’s ideological dispositions, you can predict ahead of time exactly what he or she will say about different issues. Such books contain few surprises. A few recent books on commodification suffered from this flaw.

Strings Attached is different. It is nuanced and seems, well, non-ideological. It’s not a book designed to defend or attack markets or to serve an underlying political agenda. It is a smart discussion of a complicated issue. In a Rossian-pluralist spirit, it takes commonsense moral thinking as a baseline from which departures must be justified.

Some readers will dislike it because it does not provide an algorithm or set of necessary and sufficient conditions for determining when the use of incentives is acceptable or not. However, as Robert Nozick said, there is room for words other than last words. This book is illuminating in large part because it asks all the right questions.