The Value of Nothing and Market Society

In The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy, an award-winning academic and activist Raj Patel (University of Texas) reveals the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger (as much as $200), and discusses 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.
While part one of this thought-provoking book askes 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. Patel stresses that our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. 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 concise, timely and lucid book reveals that the 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. It brightly shows how both a fairer society and a sustainable economy are possible as long as we are willing to seize back our freedom to choose from colluding governments and corporations.