I’m very much into this book I bought, The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel. And yes, my reading of it was inspired by his appearance on the Colbert Report. At the bookstore, there were actually three other women asking for it, because of the Colbert Report. I read almost half of it today, which is complicated by the fact that I’m sitting and reading it in the (I confess, wonderfully accommodating) ING bank café.
The sleeve reads: “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. Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system.”
I’ve never really been a student of economics, but I did—before reading—have vague notions of who the key players are, and who may be “good” (Keynes, in particular) and who “bad” (more or less everyone from the University of Chicago), but I’ve never really learned what externalities, and have never really thought–at least not in depth– of use value versus exchange value. It’s a great read, and I’m already at Part Two, which starts off with:
“It’s one thing to know that everyone has a seat at the lunch counter, but how do we figure out how everyone can pay for the meat?” Sounds promising. That was Obama, btw.
My favorite part, so far, however, is this:
“Other experiments have probed white North American society’s cultural attitudes toward generosity a little more by playing the Public Goods Game. The game works like this: I give you (and many other people) a fistful of tokens, and tell you that you have to choose between two ways of investing them. You can invest some (or all) of them in my bank, in which case you’ll get a guaranteed rate of a penny per token. Or you can invest some (or all) in a community bank. The community bank pays out to everyone, regardless of whether you invested in it, and the more that is put in the pot, the bigger payout for everyone. It doesn’t take many toens in the pot for the payout to everyone to be bigger than a penny per token.
“The collectively rational outcome is for everyone to put 100 percent into the chest, but for any individual, the rational decision would be to hope that everyone else puts in 100 percent while you put in 0 percent – which means you get the collective payout and the penny per token from you investment in the individual bank account.
“When high school students in Wisconsin played the game, they didn’t behave like Homo economicus and put in 0 percent—instead, they put in 42 percent. The experimenters varied everything from the payout schedule to the number of people in the group, and the amount that people put in remained roughly the same. They did it with a general group of college students, and the results were similar. With every possible permutation they could think of, there was only one time that the cooperation rate fell to 20 percent—and that was when the game was played by first-year economics graduate students.”
A big ha, ha, ha here, right? In good news: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/us/15tax.html?hp
Also, consider giving to Haiti relief fund. The texting thing is great, but if your parents pay for your family plan like mine, you can also donate online. I’m actually getting my O- butt down to the Red Cross blood bank tomorrow, too — something I’ve ashamedly never done. We’ll see how that goes.
Musical selection:
