"A deeply though-provoking book about the dramatic changes
we must make to save the planet from financial
madness."--Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine 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. Raj
Patel, the author of Stuffed and Starved, is an activist and
academic who has been hailed as "a visionary" for his
prescience about the food crisis. Raj has worked for the
World Bank and the World Trade Organization and has
protested against them on four continents. He is currently
a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for African
Studies, an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of
Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a
fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy,
also known as Food First. 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. “With
great lucidity and confidence in a dazzling array of fields,
Patel reveals how we inflate the cost of things we can (and
often should) live without, while assigning absolutely no
value to the resources we all need to survive. This is a
deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we
must make to save the planet from financial madness—argued
with so much humor and humanity that the enormous tasks
ahead feel both doable and desirable. This is Raj Patel's
great gift: he makes even the most radical ideas seem not
only reasonable, but inevitable. A brilliant book.”—Naomi
Klein, author The Shock Doctrine
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