The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity | 
| Author: Russell Roberts
Publisher: Princeton University Press
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 18532
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 216
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.7 x 0.9
ISBN: 0691135096
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780691135090
ASIN: 0691135096
Publication Date: August 17, 2008
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Product Description
Stanford University student and Cuban American tennis prodigy Ramon Fernandez is outraged when a nearby mega-store hikes its prices the night of an earthquake. He crosses paths with provost and economics professor Ruth Lieber when he plans a campus protest against the price-gouging retailer--which is also a major donor to the university. Ruth begins a dialogue with Ramon about prices, prosperity, and innovation and their role in our daily lives. Is Ruth trying to limit the damage from Ramon's protest? Or does she have something altogether different in mind? As Ramon is thrust into the national spotlight by events beyond the Stanford campus, he learns there's more to price hikes than meets the eye, and he is forced to reconsider everything he thought he knew. What is the source of America's high standard of living? What drives entrepreneurs and innovation? What upholds the hidden order that allows us to choose our careers and pursue our passions with so little conflict? How does economic order emerge without anyone being in charge? Ruth gives Ramon and the reader a new appreciation for how our economy works and the wondrous role that the price of everything plays in everyday life. The Price of Everything is a captivating story about economic growth and the unseen forces that create and sustain economic harmony all around us.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 17 more reviews...
 Painlessly teaches important ideas that can otherwise be very hard to learn. August 18, 2008
M. Strong (Milwaukee, WI USA)
35 out of 36 found this review helpful
Around halfway through this book, one of its two main characters asks the other, "Don't you think it's strange that in America, the country where the greatest economic revolution in history has taken place, the average citizen has no idea why we're richer?" Amazing question, and this book was written to give the average citizen an easy way to understand the main driver of our country's wealth. It succeeds masterfully.
The reason a book like this is necessary is that most people don't understand how a society or country becomes wealthier. As this book clearly demonstrates, most peoples' ideas on how to make citizens better off would be counter-productive, actually having the opposite effect.
Without dismissing the ideas and feelings of people who don't typically support free-market solutions to humanitarian challenges, Roberts makes a compelling and easy-to-understand case for the superiority of the free-market in achieving those goals. It's powerful, often counter-intuitive stuff. I believe that if our country is going to have a future as bright as its past, more people will need to be exposed to this type of thinking so they can vote for candidates who will make solid decisions regarding our economy and our future.
The thinking and explanations in this book are wonderful. It gets four stars rather than five because the fictional narrative is painfully stilted and hokey, but please don't let that stop you from reading this book. It will painlessly teach you things that can be very hard to learn. Besides, the hokey narratives are really part of Robert's charm.
Any voter who wants to become better at helping their country to become better off in the future should read this book to help them get a useful framework for evaluating the proposals of candidates. Highly recommended.
 Passionate about teaching--and good at it August 8, 2008
Nicole (Chicago)
17 out of 21 found this review helpful
The Price of Everything is the story of Ramon Fernandez, a tennis prodigy about to graduate from Stanford and selected to give a commencement speech. At the beginning of the novel, an earthquake rocks the Bay Area and Fernandez and his girlfriend finish their dinner by candlelight and then head to Home Depot for some flashlights. But by the time they get there, they're sold out. So the couple drives out to Hayward, the nearest location of Big Box--which has plenty of stock but which has doubled its prices in the wake of the disaster. Fernandez picks up what he needs but is upset by the plight of a poor woman who didn't bring enough money for baby food and diapers ("How could she have known that Big Box would gouge her with doubled prices?") and ends up rallying a group of people in the parking lot.
Fernandez ends up getting a personalized economics seminar from the provost of the university, Ruth Lieber, a woman truly excited about teaching. And she, along with the ensuing events, changes both Fernandez's mind and his life.
Much of the novel is a one-on-one discussion about how price signals create a market more efficient than central planning could ever do, and Roberts is good at illustrating this difficult concept. There are many examples of how the same unplanned order arises in the natural world, both explicit and implicit--for example, a flock of birds with a common goal, or dancing couples in a nightclub. But it's not strictly a series of lectures. The story of a born teacher, full of passion about even her very last student, and a young man about to go out into the world, is also fully realized.
I wouldn't say this is a novel that should be read just for fun, unless you are as dorky as me and really think this stuff is fun. But if you've ever thought about picking up a book like Freakonomics and aren't so into nonfiction, or if you've read one of the recent pop economics books and want something more basic than the flashy examples often written about, this would be a great place to start.
 A didactic novel October 2, 2008
Geoff Puterbaugh (Chiang Mai, T. Suthep, A. Muang Thailand)
8 out of 16 found this review helpful
I was really hoping to enjoy this book, but when I actually began reading it, I understood all over again why Didactic Novels (novels written to teach) are never good novels.
There was an additional irritation: all of the basic economic facts were taught "Socratically" as if the student were a small child. But the student in this "novel" is the child of an emigre Cuban, currently attending Stanford. It seems almost unbelievable that the Great Economics Teacher should need to explain to her "student" that Cuba is, to put it mildly, not working very well. Even worse, the Great Teacher pretends not to know whether the Cuban failure is due to Castro and his tyranny, or the totally ineffective US embargo. (Cubans buy anything they want from Mexico, duh).
A much more interesting read is "The Best Book on the Market." It's just better in every way. It's probably better, even for children, who hate being talked down to.
Fascinating Information on August 25, 2008
Jim Moore (Panama City, FL USA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
"The Price of Everything" is the first book I've read by Mr. Roberts. It is both (primarily) an introduction to the fascinating concept of emergent order (order that arises by human action but not guided by anything other than the "unseen hand") and (secondarily) a pretty darn moving novel. For the first few pages I was concerned that the story would get in the way of the information, but that's not the case at all: after a bit, I came to care about the characters as much as in any popular fiction. It is, after all, a parable.
Russell Roberts also hosts EconTalk ([...]), absorbing, detailed, but vastly entertaining interviews on relevant economics subjects, usually around an hour long; those podcasts (some of which the author points to in the "Further Reading" section of the book) are well worth listening to, especially the one that addresses at a little more detail the economics and positive benefits of price gouging after emergencies, something a resident of the Florida panhandle is sure to be interested in! Remember, a "free market" means no one's forced to buy or sell, it's a mutually beneficial transaction.
"The Price of Everything" should be mandatory reading for politicians, but as Mr. Roberts mentions in a podcast regarding the book itself, politicians have their own agenda to pursue and fluency in the market forces driving our economy (sadly) don't fit into those agenda.
Very highly recommended as an easy, quick introduction to pricing and free markets.
Sets up Straw Arguements September 29, 2008
C. Hahn
5 out of 28 found this review helpful
I got about half way through this book before I put it down. The Economics professor comes to lecture the idealistic student and starts explaining how much better off people are than they were 100 years ago. This means that everything is fine and companies are doing what they should.
I agree that people are better off then they were 100 years ago. But what about 30 years ago. Child mortality rates are on the rise. Wages are stagnant and their purchasing power is less than what it was. The top one percent of the population controls 25% of the wealth compared to 8% in the early 80s.
I think that this book getting dated with the current economic mess. We can turn on the news and see what happens when corporations are unregulated like is advocated in the book.
Maybe the second half of the book changes but I'll never know.
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