The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

By confronting the destruction of the commons and the creation of a fake democracy in its stead, La Via Campesina has faced the challenge of modern market society.

generosity.

Rather than hoping for a cure to prices getting it wrong, we’ll need to appreciate that prices can, at best, only give a blurry sense of priorities and possibilities. We’ll never be able to see the world clearly through the glass of the market. And that’s no bad thing. Armed with this knowledge, we can train ourselves to use our other senses, to kn

They diagnose the problem of hunger and poverty not as a shortage of food but as a lack of power,

He broke with neoclassical thinking by observing that what might be rational for an individual acting in isolation might be bad for everyone as a whole. An example of this is “the paradox of thrift”: In a recession, a reasonable thing for me to do is to start saving more than I did before, but if everyone does it, the aggregate level of demand in t

One of his concerns can be parsed out as a conflict over resources: “If any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies.”

The word value . . . has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys.

“positional goods”—the kinds of goods that reflect your social status back to you and to society—is

interest rate is the price for money, the demand for which is slave to the individual psychologies of entrepreneurs. When entrepreneurs consider how to invest, they need to evaluate not their own opinion on the best return, but everyone else’s opinion too.