A few months ago, to mark World Water Day on March 22, the National Geographic
Society released a telling chart through the pages of its magazine. The chart
showed the true consumption of water for the manufacture of a variety of
consumer products. For example, the true water consumption to make a pair of
jeans was astonishing: 2,900 gallons.
“The dazzle of free markets has
blinded us to other ways of seeing the world,” Patel writes. “As Oscar Wilde
wrote over a century ago: ‘Nowadays people know the price of everything and the
value of nothing.’”
Such “externalities” occur everywhere but the
example quoted most often is with the case of food. For example, among the many
reasons organic food is more expensive is that sustainable agriculture is not
the norm. Industrial agriculture is allowed to get away with a heavy toll on the
environment—thereby making it appear less expensive at the supermarket checkout.
“Both money and its big brother, gross domestic product (GDP), are poor measures
of well-being and happiness. Other indicators of social health and happiness not
only exist, but are far more revealing,” Patel writes.
He argues that
the popular theory—that the markets are self-correcting—assumes that the prices
of goods factor in the true social costs. The truth is that they don’t. The
market system that caused the economy to collapse so spectacularly is in
desperate need of replacement, Patel argues.
The Value of Nothing even
revisits the basics of economics. With the help of real-world examples, Patel
shows us how there’s no such thing as a free lunch. “Free” samples of baby milk
distributed in the third world, for example, entice nursing mothers to try it
out. It creates a cycle whereby the mothers stop lactating and are now forced to
buy baby milk from multinational corporations.
The second half of the
book looks at alternative forms of government. Patel draws on real-world
examples from all over the world. La Via Campesina, an international peasant
movement he visited in his previous book, Stuffed and Starved, also finds prime
real estate here. Patel shows that there are everyday examples, even in the
United States, of governance that gives everyone a seat at the table—where
profits are not those solely defined by corporations. Credit unions, for
instance, are doing well for their owners—and the owners are all the people who
save with the union. “Interest rates are higher for savers and lower for
borrowers; the credit union is more responsive to community demands, and appears
to have been less exposed to the travails of the financial crisis,” Patel
writes.
One of the problems with The Value of Nothing (and other similar
efforts) is that it might not reach the audience who really should be reading
it. In other words, people already amenable to the underlying message might the
only ones to pick it up—a case of preaching to the choir.
Another
limitation of this book is that the solutions to the problem might suffer from a
lack of scalability. The case studies of alternative methods of governance might
work at a smaller, micro level but it is hard to see an entire planet committed
to reinventing itself this way. The same problem underlies Patel’s exhortation
to readers to take a closer look at the tenets of Buddhism—a philosophy (as much
as it is a religion) that argues that followers should try and want less. Again,
while one can imagine quite a few people following such a path, it is hard to
translate that to a macro scale and envision the whole world moving away from
rabid consumerism.
That having been said, there are rays of hope. The
deep recession the United States is just coming out from has had Americans
saving more than they used to. There is also an increasing emphasis on
experiences—dining and vacations together—away from a mindless accumulation of
material goods. Shortly before he was elected president, then Senator Barack
Obama mentioned that most citizens go with the status quo when times are good.
But when times are bad—really bad—they sit up and want to try new things; they
are more amenable to change. It can’t be denied that now is one of those times.
One hopes that society is ready for the kind of systemic market change that
Patel espouses. The Value of Nothing is a sound effort in that direction.
[Poornima Apte is an award-winning journalist who reviews
contemporary fiction and nonfiction in her spare time.]