The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity
Russell Roberts
Princeton
£14.95, 216 pages

The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity is an economics novel. It tells the tale of a Stanford University student, Ramon Fernandez, who is outraged when a local store called Big Box doubles its prices in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake. Fernandez stages a peaceful protest against the store’s price-gouging tactics at the Stanford campus, but the demonstration is hijacked by a radical and it turns into a mêlée. This is an embarrassment for the college, as Big Box’s chief executive officer, Robert Bachman, is an alumnus of the college and a generous benefactor. In fact, he’s on the cusp of providing funds for a new information technology centre.

Ruth Lieber, the college’s provost and economics professor, befriends Fernandez – one assumes as an exercise in damage limitation – and thus begins a series of dialogues that attempt to justify, or at least explain, why raising prices during a crisis may not be such a terrible thing. Lieber sets about educating the socially conscious student in the wonders of free- market economics. She explains why economists don’t know the price of everything, and don’t need to know the price of everything. Prices are the information that steer knowledge and resources.

Conversations between Fernandez and Lieber take place in Lieber’s office, on a tennis court (Fernandez is a professional tennis player), at a running track, a dinner party and in a café. There’s the occasional interjection during the economics lectures such as: ‘You want another coffee?’ to remind us where we are, but the settings are not important as there is no significant plot to advance. Indeed, the book lacks many of the elements one would expect to find in a conventional novel, such as tension and three-dimensional characters.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP