There's No Such Thing as a Free Market -- Just a Matter of Who Pays for It

Raj Patel opens his new book, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy, with Oscar Wilde’s observation that “nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Patel shows how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. Revealing the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger -- as much as $200 -- he asks how we came to have markets in the first place. Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our bankrupt political system. Searching for solutions, Patel goes back to basics in both economics and politics.

Raj Patel has worked for the World Bank and WTO and been tear-gassed on four continents protesting against them. He is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, a researcher at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, a fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) and the author of Stuffed and Starved. Though recently heralded as the Maitreya (or chosen one) by members of Share International, Patel protests he's just an ordinary bloke.

Terry McNally: You have worked for and protested against some of the same organizations. Tell us a bit about your path.

Raj Patel: I’m a child of imperialism, or as it’s more recently called, globalization. My family was scattered to the winds: my father was born in Fiji, my mother in Kenya, and I grew up in Britain. I’ve long been concerned about the links between different places, and how to fight poverty in those places. I was lucky enough, being born in a diaspora community, to be taken to the global south a great deal and to spend time staring poverty in the face.

When I was in the process of my graduate studies, there came an opportunity to work at the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. As an intern at the WTO, I delivered intelligence to social movements who were very interested in how that organization worked. At the World Bank, I was offered the opportunity to write a report that gave me access to classified internal documents looking at how they represented poverty and poor people to themselves.

Unfortunately I helped produce a puff piece that the World Bank then published under the title, "Voices of the Poor – Can Anyone Hear Us?" In it, the World Bank proclaimed quite loudly that it knew poor people very well and that some of its best friends were poor. That was obviously unacceptable, and I resigned soon after the professor who had originally hired me.

TM: Your experience at the World Bank reminds me of Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, and even more specifically of ecological economist Herman Daly. When Daly was at the World Bank, they were producing a publication that included a depiction of the global economy. Daly suggested they put a frame around the economy to indicate the limits of nature. Others disagreed, and, after intense back and forth, the image was published without a frame. Daly protested that the economy does not exist in some abstract unbounded universe, and resigned soon after that.

RP: I am quite pleased to be part of a tradition of people who discover that the World Bank, however much it protests that it is interested in poverty and sustainability, turns out not to be. The fact that some pretty good people have run away from the World Bank in disgust does not mean that the people who remain are evil, but that they’re beholden to an ideology that they cannot see and they cannot change. The bankruptcy of that ideology is one of the starting points of The Value of Nothing.

TM: Could you say a bit about your earlier book, Stuffed and Starved?