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The Price of Everything

Russell Roberts, Princeton University Press, 2008, 216 pages, £14.95.

This is a tale of the provost of Stamford University and a poor Cuban boy. Or so it would seem. Russell Roberts takes these two characters and uses them to explain how economics works. Ruth Leiber was once a professor of economics and still takes one class a year to explain that everything has a price. Ramon Fernandez is a gifted tennis player, who came to America aged six when his father, a talented Cuban baseball player, died. Ramon, whose girlfriend attends Ruth Leiber’s class, gets caught up in a demonstration when a company called Big Box raises its prices during an earthquake.

The novel essentially takes the form of a dialogue between Ruth and Ramon arguing about economics, Ruth taking a full blown market economy point of view Ramon, more mixed. They are interrupted along the way by events – a protest about Big Box donating money to the campus, the death of Castro and the commencement speech by Ramon – but in between whiles Ruth and Ramon converse about the state of economic affairs as they see it.

The difficulty with the book is that Ruth Leiber has a far greater say than Ramon. Whatever one may think of free market economics there are some very good arguments to put up against it and this the novel fails to do. WalMart is praised for its health care, for example, and nothing at all is made of the melt-down that has recently faced Wall Street. The free market perspective is given in its full glory with none of the possible disadvantages explained. Ruth Leiber is a professor and so her views, although argued with at a pedestrian level, are never really called to account. She does the majority of talking – not so much a dialogue, then, more of a lecture.

Having said this, the 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 ending is a little twee, if fully expected, and shows how Ruth Leiber has never lost her talent for persuading people that the American way is best.

Bethan Marshall

Senior Lecturer, King’s College, London

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