The Price of Everything is an economics essay collection by the American journalist Eduardo Porter. A longtime reporter and editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, the author excels at turning economic concepts into stories through journalistic craft. The book's basic claim is that price is not merely a label on a store shelf but the common measure behind all human selective behavior. Marriage, childbirth, driving, buying books, drinking coffee, investing, downloading music—all ultimately involve weighing benefits against costs and paying some kind of price. Some prices are explicitly marked, others hidden; some are calculated in currency, others measured in time. From this the author launches a "global economic curiosity hunt," holding up the lens of price to fields that seem impossible to price: how much is a mansion or an artwork at auction really worth? Why do compensation sums for death differ so widely among accident victims? How should the happiness brought by work and life be measured? From polygamy to dowry and sex ratios, how do the "transactional relations" in marriage change? What separates the astronomical pay of superstars and the money playground of bankers from farmers' incomes? Why do free giveaways make people spend more? How should culture, faith, and even the risk of future destruction be converted into today's expenditure? The book proceeds in ten thematic chapters, ending on "the failure of price": when prices are distorted, people repeatedly push the economy into crisis with speculative bubbles. The author does not believe everything in the world can truly be price-tagged; he devotes discussion to humans as price creators and to things that have "no price." In his preface, Liang Xiaomin remarks that merely raising the question of pricing things that seem unpricable is meaningful in itself.
Founded in 1988 and affiliated with China CITIC Group, CITIC Press focuses on business and economics, social sciences, literature and children's books, with common categories covering social sciences, finance, literature, Eastern philosophy and literary appreciation. Its library holds 91 titles, including Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens trilogy, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Wu Xiaobo's Thirty Years of Strife: Chinese Enterprises 1978–2008, Nelly Sachs's The Weight of Butterflies: Selected Poems of Nelly Sachs, as well as New Interpretations of the Analects and Chiang Hsun's lectures on Dream of the Red Chamber. Its authors and translators include Lin Junhong, Ba Shusong, Chen Li and Chang Fen-ling. Overall, the press introduces influential works in finance and social sciences while balancing classic translation and local appreciation in literature and Eastern philosophy, combining academic depth with accessible reading.
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