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

Very interesting book.

Two things missed the mark for me. First the term value was never defined and since much of the book was trying to assign value to things, it made it easy to make an argument and just as easy to refute the argument depending on how value was defined.The other thing I thought was really off is the push for more government involvement in capitalism, particularly innovation. The areas pushed for were more regulation, more taxation, and more direction on where we should innovate. This causes two bad outcomes. With so much taxation and regulation, there is just less incentive to innovate because the monetary reward is diminished and it becomes incredibly complex to deal with the regulations. The government directing where to innovate is a real non-starter to me. They are not the experts in innovation. A perfect example of this is tech innovation in the US. Other areas would die to have the tech innovation that we do. They would love to have companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, and Netflix. Europe has zero companies like this and much of that is caused by their socialist government directing innovation. China is catching up but this is because they are acting more capitalistic than the US in many areas. To create these kinds of companies, you need to let smart people be as unencumbered as possible.One area I did agree with the author is that financialization (hedge funds et cetera) is not generating a lot for countries. It is simply transactional gambling. A couple bad things happen. A lot of the smartest people head into this field because it's fairly easy big money. It would be great to have their big brains directed elsewhere. Second, it creates a zero sum game. Unlike a new product where many people benefit in addition to the inventors, here somebody has to lose for somebody else to win. Lots of times there are only a few big winners and many losers.

'The Value of Everything' is 358 pages of mind-numbing repetitiveness and mediocrity. Pretty much the typical Euro jeremiad against capitalism without any real insights into reform. Piketty squared. Boring. A real waste of time.

an excellent look at who really created the things we take for granted today