The Price of Everything

[A]n unusual and wildly enjoyable book.

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

[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 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.

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

The Price of Everything [is] Russ Roberts’ latest didactic novel. I cannot recommend it strongly enough. I thought his other fictional attempts to teach economics were decent, but in my opinion this one represents a real step up.

Have you ever wanted to give a friend a book that explains the main virtues of economic freedom in a dramatic way that is accessible to a broad audience? Russell Roberts’s latest novel, The Price of Everything, is the book you want. That’s right: I said ‘latest novel.’

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

Don’t be put off by the title, you just might not be able to put it down. Its brilliance is in its simplicity, and it’s now the first economics book I recommend. Yes, Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom are still the cornerstones, but easy to read? No.

I loved the way Roberts wove into the story examples of what Hayek called spontaneous order that even those who believe that order happens only from the top down would have to acknowledge–from dancers moving unpredictably on the dance floor without ever colliding to the thousands of people and bits of specialized knowledge it takes to make a pencil, which nobody can make by himself. This little book deserves an audience as wide as eventually developed for ‘Economics in One Lesson.’ It conveys similar information in a more nuanced, personal and humanistic way. Nice work.