The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [0]
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE - The Price of Things
CHAPTER TWO - The Price of Life
CHAPTER THREE - The Price of Happiness
CHAPTER FOUR - The Price of Women
CHAPTER FIVE - The Price of Work
CHAPTER SIX - The Price of Free
CHAPTER SEVEN - The Price of Culture
CHAPTER EIGHT - The Price of Faith
CHAPTER NINE - The Price of the Future
EPILOGUE - When Prices Fail
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
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First published in 2011 by Portfolio/Penguin,
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Copyright © Eduardo Porter, 2011
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Porter, Eduardo.
The price of everything : solving the mystery of why we pay what we do / Eduardo Porter
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-44451-1
1. Value. 2. Values. I. Title.
HG223.P67 2011
338.5’21—dc22
2010028526
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For Gisele and Mateo
INTRODUCTION
Prices Are Everywhere
ANYBODY WHO HAS visited a garbage dump in the developing world knows that value is an ambiguous concept. To most people in the developed world, household waste is worthless, of course. That’s why we throw it away. Apparently, Norwegians are willing to pay about $114 a ton for somebody else to sort their recyclables from the general garbage. A survey of families in the Carter community of Tennessee several years ago found they were willing to pay $363 a year, in today’s money, to avoid having a landfill nearby.
But slightly beyond our immediate experience, waste becomes a valuable commodity. In Kamboinsé, outside Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, farmers pay municipal trash haulers to dump unsorted solid waste on their sorghum and millet fields as fertilizer—bits of plastic included. The going rate in 2003 was 400 francs per ton. In New Delhi, a study in 2002 found that waste pickers earned two rupees per kilo of plastic soda bottles and seven rupees per kilo of hard plastic shampoo bottles. A child working on foot on Delhi’s dumps could make twenty to thirty rupees per day.
Waste, in fact, confronts us with the same value proposition as anything else. The price we put on it—what we will trade to have it, or have it go away—is a function of its attendant benefits or costs. A bagful of two-rupee plastic bottles is more valuable to an Indian child who