eveglass | Books of 2010: 28. The Value of Nothing, Raj Patel

I have to admit that this is the first book I've read in a long, long time that's giving me problems in summarizing. It's a good book, but I'm hard-pressed to find the common thread among its myriad chapters and examples. I suppose I could start with the title, The Value of Nothing, which is drawn from an Oscar Wilde quote, "Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." Using this quote as a base, Patel goes on to perform a wide-ranging criticism of free-market capitalism.

From what I can gather, Patel's criticism stems from two sources. First, free-market capitalism attempts to put a price on everything, even things we might shy away from pricing: land, labor, and even human life. The problem with pricing these things, Patel argues, is that they become commodified and can be put to uses other than the ones originally intended. (e.g. When you assign a price value to land, poor farmers sell their acreage and are forced to become city workers.) Second, free-market capitalism allows the prices of products to ignore "externalities," everything from environmental damage to social upheaval. This allows some products to be priced artificially low (he makes the case that if all externalities were factored into a McDonald's hamburger, it would cost $200), and some products with positive externalities to seem artificially high (sustainable, organically-grown food, for example). These two factors together have caused havoc throughout the world, especially in the poorest nations and communities.

I liked Patel's individual examples, and there's a lot of food for thought in this book. I just couldn't follow the overall thread from chapter to chapter. Still, it was thought-provoking and I'm glad I read it.