Prices Are Hell.

• Author: Murray, Phil R.
• Position: Price War$: How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic World

Price War$: How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic World

By Rupert Russell 276 pp.; Doubleday, 2022

Rupert Russell is a Harvard-trained sociologist and documentary filmmaker. His new, first book, Price War$, exemplifies Regulation editor Peter Van Doren's dictum, "Prices matter a lot." The book teems with stories of the causes and effects of price changes. Russell knows price theory. He writes: "'The function of prices,' [Friedrich] Hayek said, 'is to tell people what they ought to do.'"

Van Doren has a corollary: "People don't like prices." Russell dislikes prices. In his view, they mislead and put people in dreadful circumstances. He knows how a price system is supposed to work--"prices could coordinate through a decentralised network that Hayek called a 'spontaneous order'"-but he does not see harmonious order in market prices. He explains, "As I had seen time and time again, from the Enlightenment through the British Empire to the Wall Street crash to the Financial Crisis, the rule of prices is chaotic."

World of chaos / This is a longstanding problem for economists. Where they see order, others see chaos. Why?

First, there is chaos in the world. Russell has toted a camera around the globe, filming it. He traveled to Mosul, Iraq. One might think the Islamic State created the chaos there when it attacked in 2014, but Russell sees markets as the cause. When the price of wheat rose substantially in 2011, Syrians strained to afford bread and rose up against their government. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi filled the power vacuum with the Islamic State. The high price of oil in 2011 boosted the revenues he earned from selling Syrian oil and financed the Islamic State's attack on Mosul.

Russell also traveled to Ukraine after the Russian invasion in 2014. One might think Vladimir Putin's megalomania caused the turmoil there, but Russell again blames markets. A high price for oil filled Russia's treasury, financing the invasion.

Russell traveled to Venezuela, where people struggle to feed themselves and face other social maladies. Economists in general blame socialism for causing the retrogression in that country. Once more, Russell blames markets. In his view, "The Venezuelan apocalypse was made in the markets: the chavista regime was built on a wave of black gold and then suffocated by a shortage of dollars." By that he means Venezuelans shift between feast and famine as the price of oil rises and falls. When the price is high, the Venezuelan bolivar appreciates, imports are cheap, and government spending expands. When the price...