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The Value of Nothing: Why Everything Costs So Much More Than We Think

by Raj Patel

Toronto: HarperCollins, 2009

As retirement funds shrink and savings disappear, now is a good time to ask a question for which every human civilization has had an answer: why do things cost what they do? Examining everything from free lunches to military spending, from love to television. The Value of Nothing reveals the hidden social consequences our global culture of “freedom” and explains why prices are always at odds with the true value of what matters to us. 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.

While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath our 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. This inspiring and provocative book argues that we need to learn from both ancient civilizations and cutting-edge neuroscience to develop ways of governing ourselves sustainably, equitably and generously. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and accessible way to  think about economics and the choices we need to make to create a sustainable world.

Raj Patel was educated at Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University. The author of the bestselling Stuffed and Starved, he is currently a fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy in Oakland, California; a visiting researcher at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa; and a visiting scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He has worked for the World Bank, interned at the WTO, consulted for the UN and been involved in international campaigns against his former employers. Visit Raj Patel at www.rajpatel.org.