I recently discovered the basement at Blackwell’s in Oxford and the surprisingly large economics section (ht: von Bel!)… The good thing about hanging out in a bookstore is that you buy stuff you’re not necessarily looking for, hence you broaden your horizon… or not… anyway, I bought two books I hadn’t heard of. The first one is “The price of everything” by Eduardo Porter, a journalist at the NY Times, who also worked at the Wall Street Journal. I’m not sure what to think of this book. The comments on the cover suggest the book is enthralling, enlightening, and full of freakonomicsy nuggets… I wouldn’t go that far. It starts off with a chapter on how humans make decisions following subconscious cost-benefit analyses, as if the journalist had just discovered economics and found it so powerful. He then devotes chapters to the economics of happiness, climate change, intellectual property, always explaining why all these concepts can be valued using a dollar number. He’s quite good at vulgarizing research, but by doing so he oversells the results quite a bit… His concluding chapter covers the financial collapse, warning that prices often fail… Weird for a book which point seem to have been to put a price on everything…