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The Price of Everything by Russell Roberts

Chapter 1 (Thinking outside the Box) Starts out with what seems to be a family escaping from somewhere. The family that happens to be escaping was Ramon Fernandez and his Mother. The place that they were escaping from was Cuba. Quickly switches gears to Ramon and Amy who seems to be either his girlfriend or his wife not sure. And they are looking for flash lights at the local home depot. They soon found out that the flashlights sold out hours before. They wanted the flashlights because a recent earthquake caused a power outage. Ramon is a 20 year old star tennis player for Stanford. He has won 3 straight NCAA singles titles and went to the finals in Wimbledon the year prior. The travel to a large chain store Big Box somewhat like a Wal-Mart but a lot bigger, in search of the flashlight. When they arrive at the Big box store they find a large mob outside the door. This mob is angry about the Big Box store having a sign on their windows saying that the price of everything is doubled.

2 Ramon and Amy get the items that they needed and they go to the checkout. At the checkout they find this lady that his having a fit over the prices to the clerk. Ramon goes over to the Spanish speaking lady and calms her. He soon finds out that she did not have enough money buy the required goods because she did not anticipate the doubled prices. Ramon corals some support from others in the line and in no time they have enough money to cover the rest of the bill. He then stops the mob by using the microphone that the sales associate had and talks some sense to the crowd. Instead of getting the crowd to go ballistic on the worker he instructed the people to fill out the complaints and send them to HQ. Chapter 2 (Out of Control) It opens by talking about Ramons Father Jose Fernandez one of the greatest baseball players that ever played in Cuba. Then we switch the story around all together and we meet a professor named Ruth who teaches economics. This is her last semester teaching and this is the last class that she will teach. To start the class she poses the class with the question of who makes the pencil. She then goes on to tell about the simple look of the pencil can be deceiving. One of the most remarkable things she says is that there is so many people that make a pencil. And the funny thing since so many go into making the pencil how is it managed? She answers this questions by referring to Adam Smith by what he called the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another

3 Smith understood that order can emerge without someone being in charge to impose the order from above. Just by people buying and selling with each other. You can have an organized system without having someone run it. Chapter 3 (Birds of a Feather) Celia, Ramons mother has a tough decision to make does she stay after her husband Jose died. She soon sees that staying is not the option because Castro would probably take Ramon away from his mother and sent off to a sports academy. So Celia talks to her brother Eduardo to help her to get off Cuba. After Ramon and his mother leave Cuba Castro orders everything that Jose Fernandez ever did be removed or destroyed so that nobody would remember Jose. The story then goes back to Ramon but this time he is in the mood to stop corporate oppression on the common people. He meets up with a guy named Heavy Weather who is big into protests and government antics to attempt to get his help and to decide on the location of the protest After they are done talking Ramon and Amy meet by a pond and start to talk about their day and classes. Amy tells Ramon about the Economics assignment that her professor had given to the class and how difficult it is to come up with an example that was not similar to the pencil. While in the meantime Amy was not taking the time to notice how there was always the right number of birds to be fed in the pond not to many or not enough. The go to a club in San Francisco and dance while Amy is worrying what Ramon could possibly get himself into with the protest against Big Box. Could it help or could it very well hurt his career.

4 Chapter 4 (Inconceivable) It starts off with telling of Ramon, his mother and how she struggled to make ends meat by her working two jobs. Goes on to tell how Celia learned English for the betterment of Ramon and herself and also to feel like an American. Next the story once again takes a turn back to Ruth as she examines the classes homework assignments. Amy tells Ruth of the flock of birds that she found chasing the hawk away and how they could all fly together without any direction except instinct. Which leads Ruth to the need to explain the necessity for people to specialize in their own specific tasks. She then goes on to tell about how if people were to specialize they would become better at the jobs that they were doing and would find better ways to make the product also called efficiency. F. A. Hayek calls how everything falls together seamless in perfect harmony the particular circumstances of time and place also considered to be called ingenuity Ruths point was that even if someone could find out all there is to know about a seller and a buyer the information would become obsolete within a very short period of time She goes on that all of these happenings come about by the prices of the goods and services The rise in prices causes some buyers and sellers to look for cheaper alternatives to the product which in turn causes the price of the once desired item to go back towards the market equilibrium point

5 Ruth goes on to tell her students about how things like language incorporate into economics How words are created and destroyed without any one person controlling the words She also talks about the controlling of the traffic patterns on the weekdays vs. the weekends. She states that the traffic at 6pm on Tuesday is horrendous compared to the traffic at 6 pm on Saturday, yet no one controls the traffic patterns She states how ants send out a signal for other ants to tell them where the food is Then she goes on to explain how people in the housing market can set a price at whatever they want but if it is to outrageous for that area people will not even bother to look at it causing the house to get closer to the valued price of the buyer The big misnomer of economics is that people think that is mostly common sense, that is not entirely true. The deepest thing of economics is learning to understand the process that is unplanned order without anyone controlling it. To close she said prices are like a thermostat if you mess with the temperature you will cause some disorder and cause the prices go back to equilibrium Chapter 5 (Leaning on the Gardener) This chapter starts off with telling how Ramon had gotten into tennis The story then shifts back to Ruth getting a call from the CEO of Big Box Robert Bachman. He calls to tell her that he had gotten news that Stanford was going to have a protest about raising prices during disaster times.

6 He makes a kind reminder to Ruth about the possible $ that we could be donating to the school around 35 million dollars. Ruth continues to get calls by Bob trying to get the protest stopped and this time by threatening to sue the school and take away the funding ( what the students had wanted) The protest had started with a bang and Ramon had grasped the crowd with his speech of the night of the quake and the Mexican family This speech enraged the crowd and it caused to turn violent basically running over anyone in that had gotten in the way of the angry protestors It ends with Ramon limping to the Gym after being trampled, Amy getting carried off by the crowd and Ruth calling the police to help the injured victums Chapter 6 (Mea Culpa) -