Oscar Wilde observed,
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of
nothing.” Patel’s book, The Value of Nothing, 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.

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.

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.

To read the first
chapter, click here: http://bit.ly/1ajaxZ. For more
information on both Raj Patel and The Value of Nothing, visit http://www.rajpatel.org.
Video directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy (http://www.thegardenmovie.com).