The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

by Mariana Mazzucato

So while economics students used to get a rich and varied education in the idea of value, learning what different schools of economic thought had to say about it, today they are taught only that value is determined by the dynamics of price, due to scarcity and preferences. This is not presented as a particular theory of value–just as Economics 101, the introduction to the subject. An intellectually impoverished idea of value is just taken as read, assumed simply to be true. And the disappearance of the concept of value, this book argues, has paradoxically made it much easier for this crucial term ‘value’–a concept that lies at the heart of economic thought–to be used and abused in whatever way one might find useful.