Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity » Raj Patel http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman The ways law rules creative endeavors and the ways law itself is a creative endeavor Thu, 09 Feb 2012 03:19:27 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 We know the price of everything and the value of nothing. http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman/2010/02/we-know-the-price-of-everything-and-the-value-of-nothing/ http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman/2010/02/we-know-the-price-of-everything-and-the-value-of-nothing/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:31:41 +0000 pfriedman http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman/2010/02/we-know-the-price-of-everything-and-the-value-of-nothing/  Read more]]> A couple of weeks ago I quoted from Tony Judt’s critique of free market ideology. Raj Patel, in “How Free Market Delusions Destroyed the Economy,” goes into considerable depth about the stupidity of our faith in markets, but this brief point makes clear the wisdom underlying the entire article:

There is a discrepancy between the price of something and its value, one that economists cannot fix, because it’s a problem inherent to the very idea of profit-driven prices. This gap is something about which we’ve got an uneasy and uncomfortable intuition. The uncertainty about prices is what makes the MasterCard ads amusing. You know how it goes — green fees: $240; lessons: $50; golf club: $110; having fun: priceless. The deeper joke, though, is this: The price of something doesn’t measure its value at all.

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