Book of the week: The Price of Everything by Eduardo Porter

last updated 8 January 2015

(Portfolio, $27.95)

This recent addition to our new century’s growing “heap of pop economics books” never delivers what it promises, said Martin Sandbu in the Los Angeles Times. New York Times editorial writer Eduardo Porter vows early on to show how price is the deciding factor in every choice we make, but if that were true, why would anyone choose to lavish hundreds of hours on writing a book? Porter seems to want his thesis to work, but his readers will be glad that the majority of his anecdotes touch on times when prices “fail to steer our lives.” Not that Porter’s isolated insights can be trusted either, said Jonathan Last in The Wall Street Journal. He wrongly attributes the entire post–baby boom decline in U.S. fertility rates to women’s growing presence in the workforce, for instance. Occasionally, Porter hits on a striking proposition. But mostly his book is “a grab bag of liberal pieties” masquerading as economics.