"With epic scope, The Value of Nothing poses a spirited exploration of everything from the influence of market extremist Gary Becker of the Chicago School of Economics (and contemporary of Alan Greenspan) to social movements on food sovereignty and participatory budgeting that show us what real democracy is, or should be, about. [...] What I like about this book is that is a work of engaged ideas, particularly Patel's investigation into the consciousness of market society. [...] What I like less is the book's nascent ideological assumption that readers, alongside governments and financial elites, need to be disabused of any attachments to markets or private property. We're told that it is corporations, not people, who are to blame for the great environmental disasters of our time [...] Private property and sustainability may seem fundamentally incompatible, an assertion that is interesting but lacks proof. Patel also rejects the use of market-based tools like carbon pricing to combat things like climate change. [...] Clearly, ideology is still the catnip of the global left, and this occasional weakness for portraying the world as a clash of malevolent ideas versus social movements often blinkers its proponents to over-focus on things that reflect a dialectical and neo-liberal bent, like the World Bank, American finance and Ayn Rand. Patel is hardly the worst offender on this point, but it does constrain his analysis. Simply put, free-market fundamentalism is an obvious factor, but it cannot explain the fullness of our crisis. [...] Patel's arguments are well-crafted and will likely, and predictably, find agreement among many who will purchase the book. But his real contribution is something bigger than another attack on neo-liberalism and the Chicago School of Economics. This is someone who has done field work around the world, listened prolifically to non-experts, and come away with a political modality that isn't just ideology, but speaks to human flourishing itself."

"The idea of a post-market economy is today what it has been for decades: an intellectual toy rather than a serious political project. For all his forensic dissection of free market thinking, this is a predicament that Patel cannot escape. The first half of The Value of Nothing, showing the unreality of efficient markets and Homo economicus, continues the demolition of market fundamentalism that events have set in train. The second section, where Patel discusses options to the hegemony of the market, is markedly less convincing. [...] Patel fails to confront the most fundamental contemporary fact, which is that the majority of people in every country clearly want a type of economy – the sort that rich countries have enjoyed in the recent past – that the planet cannot sustain. [...] It is telling that when trying to flesh out a non-market account, Patel turns to religion, in this case Buddhism. The Buddhist tradition gives him what he needs – an understanding of human wellbeing that does not centre round the satisfaction of wants. [...] It is a thought that occurs to many well-off people from time to time, but it is hard to imagine large numbers of people ever acting on it."

"Patel’s The Value of Nothing is very much in the tradition of the Victorian moralists, particularly those who wrote sermons—many of them graduated from Oxbridge universities as he did. [...] Unfortunately, that hardly represents a viable vision of the world we live in. In the real world, greed is good. Base passions like the desire to earn money make the world go round, and the real people who live in it use them not only to survive, but also to make the world better. The world needs markets and prices to make that effort work. [...] Certainly, companies need increased social responsibility, and this has been one of the themes of corporate governance in the past ten years. But to jump from there to a facile and illogical condemnation of market economics is a leap from the sublime to the ridiculous."