It isn’t every day that video trumps the written word, but the video trailer for Raj Patel’s The Value of Nothing is such a pithy introduction to this challenging and important book, it bears repeating: “From the 1970s onward, our economy was hijacked by free-market fundamentalists whose mantra was greed is good, regulation is bad,” Patel says on his website. “But it gets darker still: We were all along for the ride. We bought, ate and drove more. And paid for it with debt, diabetes and pollution.
“We mortgaged our future,” he argues. “And called it freedom.”
Sound timely? It is.
The Value of Nothing: Why Everything Costs So Much More Than We Think, by Raj Patel, HarperCollins, 250 pages, $26.99
This book comes at an important juncture. At a time when every major Western nation is betting hard on a full recovery from the great global recession, this unprecedented attempt to spend our way back to normal – through hundreds of billions in bailout and stimulus dollars – is creating new risk. And it’s not just because of incomplete reform of a financial system prone to collapse: More profoundly, many nations are depleting their very ability to govern and address critical problems like unemployment, health care and climate change simply because they are increasingly overspent on salvaging a broken status quo. Amazingly, the United States now boasts an unemployed pool that is nearly equal to Canada’s entire population, where as many as six million households continue to live off food stamps, with no other income.
The cost of normal is becoming unsustainable, something that became clearer this month when President Barack Obama reported a budget of $3.8-trillion and unprecedented deficits for the next decade. That's quite a price tag for a recovery attempt that has thus far failed to rescue millions from destitution and foreclosure.
Today's financial crisis is no mere anomaly, Patel argues
“There's a widely shared opinion that normality will ultimately return to the world economy,” writes Patel, a renowned economist who divides his time among several institutions. “But it is a consensus view that rests on a narrative of [economic] bubbles being exceptions to the standard.” If our assumptions about the stability and wisdom of markets were flawed, as former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan famously admitted to U.S. Congress in 2008, “then our faith in a gentle return to earth is misplaced, for there is not, and never has been, any solid ground beneath our feet.”
Patel argues that our problem isn't just the size of our stimulus package, but a deep misapprehension about the relationship between society and economy that dates back well before the great crash of 2008. And, more to the point, it is our propensity to over-value destructive things – such as financial derivatives and crude oil – and under-value truly valuable things – such as sustainable food production, our global climate and other so-called externalities that market society has often neglected. This results not only in bad outcomes, but “indelible inequalities in power.” In other words, if today's quest to regain yesterday's growth fails under the stress of 21st-century challenges, it likely won't be Wall Street paying the price.
Consequently, today's financial crisis is no mere anomaly, Patel argues, but a continuation of a struggle over resources, property and government that dates back to the privatization of common lands in the early decades of England's Industrial Revolution. “The perpetual quest for economic growth has turned humankind into an agent of extinction, through the systematic undervaluing of the eco-systemic services that keep our Earth alive,” he writes. “In short, the consumer economy takes a great deal for granted, for free, and is constitutionally unable to pay for it.”
