Alert! Kenya-born academic and activist Raj Patel is releasing a new book this week, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy. To introduce it, he’s made this new YouTube video with his US publishers, Picador:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P03nNeYiJo[/youtube]
Here’s the blurb from UK publishers Portobello:
Credit has crunched, debt has turned toxic, the gears of the world economy have ground to a halt. It’s now clear that the market doesn’t only get it wrong about sub-prime mortgages, it gets it wrong about everything.
We need to ask again one of the most fundamental questions a society ever addresses, and one to which very few people know or understand the answer: why do things cost what they do?
Radical, original, nimbly argued, The Value of Nothing uses some fundamental but forgotten economics and some cutting edge neuroeconomics to show how the price we pay for everything from food, to handbags, to fridges, to entertainment, is systematically distorted. After reading this book, the question ‘How much?’ will never just be about the price on the sticker.
You can read the book’s first chapter:
If war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography, recession is His way of teaching everyone a little economics.
The great unwinding of the fi nancial sector showed that the smartest mathematical minds on the planet, backed by some of the deepest pockets, had not built a sleek engine of permanent prosperity but a clown car of trades, swaps and double dares that, inevitably, fell to bits. The recession has not come from a defi cit of economic knowledge, but from too much of a particular kind, a surfeit of the spirit of capitalism. The dazzle of free markets has blinded us to other ways of seeing the world. As Oscar Wilde wrote over a century ago: “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Prices have revealed themselves as fickle guides: The 2008 financial collapse came in the same year as crises in food and oil, and yet we seem unable to see or value our world except through the faulty prism of markets.
Book details
Thanks to @TallStoriesBook for the tip
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