Picador 2010
Opening with Oscar Wilde's observation that "nowadays people know
the price of everything and the value of nothing," Patel shows how our
faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. He reveals
the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger (as much as $200),
and asks how we came to have markets in the first place. Both the
corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel
argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system.
If
part one asks how we can rebalance society and limit markets, part two
answers by showing how social organizations, in America and around the
globe, are finding new ways to describe the world's worth. If we don't
want the market to price every aspect of our lives, we need to learn how
such organizations have discovered democratic ways in which people, and
not simply governments, can play a crucial role in deciding how we
might share our world and its resources in common.
This
short, timely and inspiring book reveals that our current crisis is not
simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we
need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger
failure beneath the food, climate and economic crises is a political
one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn't often said
who gets to make them. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and
accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need
to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society.
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