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.
Alert! The London Book Fair may be several months away, but a veritable army of South African writers have already booked their tickets. In several cases, of course, we’re talking bus tickets, because many an SA scribe lives or works in the UK, and won’t have much to do to get to Earl’s Court, where the Fair takes place. But literally dozens of others will be packing for the long-haul flight from JNB to LHR come the tail end of April 2010.
BOOK SA understands that the following authors have given commitments (ranging from tentative to firm) to be part of the LBF’s South Africa Market Focus programme:
What a lineup – it’s going to be one heck of a party! (Plus, several other authors who’ve been invited are still deciding whether they can make the trip.) BOOK SA will be there, of course – and we can’t wait to bring all the action to our readers online.
For Londoners who want to get to know these authors better, a sampling of their works:
Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of John Carlin’s Invictus seems geared to make a worldwide splash. And why wouldn’t it? The film captures an iconic moment in South African history – when Nelson Mandela strode out onto the playing field at Loftus Versveld in Francois Pienaar’s number 6 rugby jersey in 1995.
It was a great moment, certainly – but the Mail & Guardian’s David Smith points out that, when it comes to transformation and race relations, SA rugby is still looking for a real happy ending:
Freeman will be in Johannesburg for the premiere of Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-tipped movie telling how Mandela used the power of sport to heal the scars of apartheid and bring black and white South Africans together.
The film shows Mandela embracing the Afrikaners’ cherished sport, rugby, as South Africa hosts the Rugby World Cup in 1995. Whereas previously he and other black people had cheered for the Springboks’ opponents, by the end he is wearing their green and gold jersey and rallying black people to the national side.
Alert!The Book Lounge has released its list of 2009’s must-have reads – a terrific, considered collection of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and cookbooks that features many works of SA Lit (all shown above).
There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni, Kopano Ratele Book homepage EAN: 9781869141660 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Controversial Department of Arts and Culture mandarin Sandile Memela has produced a scathing attack on South Africa’s black writers, accusing the likes of Zakes Mda, Moeletsi Mbeki, William Gumede, Jacob Dlamini and others of pandering to white interests and holding back South Africa’s development into a truly just society with views that are “far too reactionary, simple and predictable – especially from blacks with PhDs”.
Stop rubbishing the government and start celebrating freedom! is Memela’s plaintive cry:
The last ten years have been marked by a strange phenomenon in black writing.
This is a visible and negative literary portrayal of the black experience and critical assault on black identity and achievement.
This is quite ironic.
But black writers have, unwittingly, become enemies of everything that their people fought for.
In an “au courant” piece on new SA-related books, Jeremy Gordin, author of Zuma: A Biography, pooh-poohs the concerns about South Africa raised by Paul Trewhela (Inside Quatro) and Rian Malan (Resident Alien), with regard to the rising influence of the Communist Party here.
But this hasn’t stopped Trewhela from sounding the warning klaxons against allowing the SACP a greater say in SA’s future:
I’ll forgive a man who can write well just about anything – which is why the first book I want to mention is the recently-published Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and Swapo (Jacana Books) by Paul Trewhela. Trewhela writes wonderfully, with passion and enormous clarity, and anyone interested in our “real” recent history should read this book.
The reason I have to “forgive him” is that I find him annoying – like a neighbourhood dog that barks at 3am every day and won’t stop. And one of the issues about which he bangs on incessantly is Jacob Zuma’s alleged complicity in the death in Lusaka of Muziwakhe Ngwenya, better known as Thami Zulu.
Gordin complains that my book is “annoying” because I sound “like a neighbourhood dog that barks at 3am every day and won’t stop.” But isn’t that what a dog is for, when danger is inside the gate?
It is time for South Africans to read again those classic investigations of totalitarianism: George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (published 1949), Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Czselaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind (1953) – all written while Comrade Stalin was alive, the idolatrous subject of the adulation of the CPSA/SACP.
Julius Malema is nie ‘n slagoffer van rassisme nie.
Só skryf Breyten Breytenbach op Die Burger se webtuiste in reaksie op Antjie Krog se stelling dat die uitsprake van Julius Malema die resultaat is van wit mense se gebrek aan begrip vir swart mense.
Krog het dít gesê by die bekendstelling van haar boek, Begging to Be Black by die Kaapse Persklub. Lees meer oor wat sy gesê het hier:
Die uitsprake van mnr. Julius Malema, president van die ANC-jeugliga, is die resultaat van ’n versugting by swart mense “om beter verstaan te word”.
Malema verwoord “dit wat ons nie wil hoor nie omdat hy meen daar bestaan ’n gebrek aan begrip”, het die skrywer Antjie Krog hier gesê.
Dié digter en oudjoernalis het voor die Kaapse Persklub oor haar jongste boek, Begging to Be Black (uitgegee deur RandomHouse/Struik), gepraat. Die boek is die derde deel van ’n drieluik wat Country of My Skull en A Change of Tongue insluit.
Breytenbach het teruggekap en gesê Malema is eerder “die dikgevrete produk van ‘n kultuur van toe-eiening” en dat dit nie sal help as wit mense op die knieë na hom kruip nie. Lees sy volle repliek hier:
Ek dink Antjie Krog slaan die bal ’n bietjie skeef betreffende die beweegredes vir Julius Malema se optredes.
Dat rassisme springlewendig is hier en bykans oral ter wêreld, is so waar soos ’n donkie. Dis ’n feit dat wit mense in die algemeen geen begrip het of selfs kan hê van die dieptes van ellende en lyding van swart mense deur die eeue nie, wat aan hulle toedoen toegeskryf moet word. Dat die media in hulle roederlose gebrek aan ’n morele deontologie die vure stook, onder meer deur die verguising van onbevoegde swart bedryfsleiers en politieke trogvrate, word daagliks oor die blaaie geblaker.
Dat die oorgrote medemensliewende meerderheid siek en sat is vir die gemors in Suid-Afrika en ook versot is op die eina-lekker rillings van sensasie, is tog duidelik.
It’s twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the world’s nations have yet to establish a new equilibrium. Two recently-published SA authors team up to pinpoint South Africa’s place in the ongoing political and demographic evolution. “This is the age in which the facts of borders and visa applications matter much to the rich but very little to the poor,” they write. Highly recommended:
So, this conclusion is undeniable: the facts that make for the social world, as the sociologists insist, are stubborn. This explains why, in recent years, much attention has been given to the mechanical idea of “statemaking”.
Most visibly this has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan where respective invasions have struggled to create the conditions necessary for viable states. This is a return to the 19th-century idea that states could be hacked out of often adverse social conditions if the necessary force were brought to bear on the social world.
In other places the idea of states as a means to social organisation — let alone social discipline — has simply disappeared. It is not difficult to understand why Somalia is said to be a “failed state”.
And when New Orleans almost drowned three years ago that little corner of the United States looked decidedly like a “failed state”. What this confirms is that all social formations are “working models” — to use a recent phase from the Indian writer, Arundhati Roy.
In South Africa these have revealed a particular pathology. It was apartheid’s infatuation with modernity and its long support by Western capital that stunted any hope that the nationalism on offer in Afrikaner-ruled South Africa could be anything but partial.
Architects of Poverty: Why Africa’s Capitalism needs Changing by Moeletsi Mbeki EAN: 9781770101616 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Re-imagining the Social in South Africa: Critique and Post-Apartheid Knowledge edited by Heather Jacklin, Peter Vale Book homepage EAN: 9781869141790 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
IOL journalist Theresa Smith attended the launch of Exclusive Books’ The List 2009 and brought back this report – which focuses on the new biography out from her Independent colleagues Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp:
Let it not be said that there is any favouritism about the appearance of Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp’s Hani: A Life Too Short at the top of Exclusive Books’ list of best books for 2009.
Just because the authors happen to work for The Star has nothing to do with the book’s top position. Instead the annual list has been alphabetically categorised and African biography is where it starts.
The recently published biography of Chris Hani tops the list of 68 books chosen by Exclusive Books store managers, with that being the most books the smaller stores can comfortably display.
Exclusive Books marketing strategist Batya Green said the list was compiled by store managers because they were the ones who best understood what their patrons were interested in reading.
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:
