The Price of Everything

The Price of Everything illuminates the astonishing economic world we live in. This book could change your life—reading it will give you a sense of wonder about the everyday marvels that are all around us.

Take a look at the computer screen your eyes are presently (hopefully) fixated on, not to mention the computer mouse you used in order to click on this posting. Did you ever consider how both were made? Could you make either yourself, and if so, how and where would you acquire the various raw materials and parts in order to create them? If the above questions vex you, the George Mason economics professor Russell Roberts’s excellent new novel, The Price of Everything, is for you. Importantly, Roberts does not explain how things are made in this tale as much as he teaches us through a very interesting dialogue between a professor and student that the ‘whole system we call a market economy works as well as it does precisely because of how little we have to know.

A remarkable use of parables and dialogues to convey economic intuitions. This should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand this branch of applied philosophy we call economics.

This book is the third foray into the world of economic fiction for Roberts. In terms of prose and content, it is also his best effort. . . . In this new book, set on and around the Stanford University campus, Roberts bundles several clever insights about everyday economics with the overriding theme of prosperity and economic growth, and pulls it all off with warmth and plenty of heart.

The best attempt to teach economics through fiction that the world has seen to date.

Improbable as it might seem, perhaps the most important fact for a voter or politician to know is: No one can make a pencil. That truth is the essence of a novella that is, remarkably, both didactic and romantic. Even more remarkable, its author is an economist. If you read Russell Roberts’s The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity you will see the world afresh.

[T]he novel is eminently readable. And if you did not know anything about how the American system works you would come away from reading it better informed.

The Price of Everything is sensationally good fiction and sensationally good economics.

The Price of Everything is a must read for anybody interested in how market capitalism works.

[The Price of Everything] is Roberts’s third economics novel–the first two were Choice: A Fable of Free Trade and Protectionism and The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance. They are great introductions to free-market economic theory, especially for those who are easily turned off by numbers and graphs. Wrapping a narrative around economic theories may seem like a peculiar approach to teaching, but didactic novels have a long and noble pedigree.