Customer Reviews

The Value Of Nothing

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Patel has written a lucid, entertaining, and radical book that re-examines our relationship and dependence on free market economics. In the first part of this short book, Patel gives an extremely well written history of free market economics, the philosophy behind it, and its implementation and growth around the world. His explanation of the recent recession and the causes are brilliantly woven into this narrative and made simple to understand by those who may not know much about financial capital and market mechanisms.

The main thrust of his book seems to be that in putting all of our trust in the free market to create value in things (environment, human life, labour, food, land, information) we have actually become completely blind to their true value. He puts forth the idea that we need to take a step back from market ideology and look at other ways of valuing things, of understand what is property, what can be owned, what can be bought and sold. The free market misses many costs through corporations externalizing many of their operating costs onto the rest of society. For example, the costs of pollution get pushed onto the environment, the costs of health care for their employees are pushed onto government and thus onto the tax base, and so on. If these costs were truly incorporated, everything would be a lot more expensive.

The second half of the book dives deep into a plethora of different global issues, all examined under the rubric of this re-evaluation of value and property and the cobra-like stranglehold the market has on our ideas of these two things. I found the second half to a bit disjointed in its wide scope from witches to shackdwellers to climate change to food security to open-source software. Patel does manage to tie things together, but not as well as he could have. Considering how well he dismantled the idea of free market ideology in the first part of the book, I didn't think he did as well as a job of filling that vacuum with the narratives and information in the second half.

Patel's vision of the future has markets of need, not profit, and includes participatory democracy and a take-back of the commons and the idea that certain things are meant to be public and not private. As he says near the end of the book, "what needs to plucked out of us is the belief that markets are the only way to value the world."

Those that have read Bill McKibben's Deep Economy or Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce will have much to love in this book.

This is a a very readable, even engaging book. It explains the early co-evolution of market systems with social systems and how each system has adapted to conform with the other. Unequal power can be a feature of either system but with the emergence of international corporations unequal market system power can now affect, even control, social systems on a global scale.
Highly recommended especially for anyone with any sense of responsibility as a citizen of our planet earth.