!e Price of Everything (Unplugged)A conversation between Eduardo Porter & Moe Abdou

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The Price of Everything (Unplugged) Eduardo Porter with Moe Abdou !

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About Eduardo Porter & Moe Abdou

Eduardo Porter

Eduardo Porter is an editorial writer and commentator specializing in business, regulation, trade and international economic relations. He writes about business, economics, and many other matters as a member of the New York Times editorial board. All of his work reflects a global outlook developed by years of writing and reporting in Mexico, South America, Japan, and the UK. He was the editor of the Brazilian edition of America Economia and covered the Hispanic population of the United States for the Wall Street Journal.

Moe Abdou

Moe Abdou is the creator of 33voices — a global conversation about things that matter in business and in life. moe@33voices.com

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It’s a real pleasure to have you with us today. I could give you a big bio and a long bio but I’m going just be very brief. You have been a columnist for the New York Times for a long time. More importantly, you’re the author of a very intriguing book, The Price of Everything.

I want to start Eduardo with just a simple question. In your research for this book in particular, tell me the most important thing that you’ve learned about the choices that we make in life.

The most important thing that I have learned is actually how many choices we make without thinking about the underlying calculations of our choices. That we will go in and choose a certain path over another; get married and have children, go to school or not go to school, get a job. All of these decisions ultimately imply cost-benefit calculations. There are prices that are guiding us this way and that.

We often make these decisions as if these prices weren’t there. And we do not evaluate what is it that is really driving our options. For me, the realization that these costs and these benefits are there and that I am processing them in some way, sometimes like below the radar and in an instinctive way. I found that particularly interesting because it gave me a new perspective on why I chose certain things and not certain others.

Let me give you an example, a very trivial small example on how I purchase coffee. When I started to work on this book, I started wondering why is it that some days I’ll buy coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts while other days, I’ll buy coffee upstairs if there is an Elite Café in the building where I work. Sometimes I’ll just buy it from the guy in the corner stand. Sometimes I’ll buy it from near my home. Sometimes near the office.

I’m feeling, what is it that is leading me to purchase this experience in a difference place? What it led me to question is, what is it that I was buying? It was clearly not just coffee. Because for instance, I was willing to pay $3.50 for a coffee right above me instead of going downstairs rather than upstairs and paying $3.02 at the Dunkin’ Donuts.

Clearly, I was choosing something more than the coffee. I was choosing the experience. So if I went upstairs, the Elite Café is kind of like more of a brush feel, more elegant. It has a little bit more of a luxurious feel, nice little chairs. There are also other colleagues from my building that I could meet and have a chat with there. It’s got some beautiful lights. Going downstairs to the Dunkin’ Donuts was kind of like more of an anonymous experience.

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So I said, okay, I think I’m just buying coffee but interestingly, I’m actually buying more. I am buying a sense of belonging. If I go to the Starbucks, you know, the idea of sitting with other people looking kind of like in a grungy way and working on their laptops. That might be something pleasurable to me. This is a long winded way of saying sometimes we’re purchasing more than what we think we’re purchasing immediately.

You know I was going to ask you another question regarding that but you’ve just triggered a thought in my mind so I want to address that for a minute. You talk about the café upstairs as opposed to the Dunkin’ Donuts. I’m sure maybe the prices are different.

If I want that experience which happens everywhere, whether it’s in a fine hotel or whether it’s in a four star hotel, I’m going to pay the $5 for that cup of coffee upstairs so I can sit on a nice chair and experience that as opposed to the $3 downstairs at the Dunkin’ Donuts where I can buy and run.

Yeah, that’s right, if that’s part of your set of preferences. I would argue that this is a fairly rational process. I mean there is something more that you’re getting up here right upstairs. There is the plushness of the chair and what not, and that’s worth something to you. So it’s reasonable that you’ll pay more for it.

You may also be willing to pay more for something that’s more conveniently on your way from home to work; say, the Starbucks that right outside your subway station. That’s perfect for you so you’ll be willing to pay more to buy coffee at that Starbucks rather than another place that’s a couple of blocks down. It’s cheaper and maybe equally good.

Prices can also operate on us in perhaps less clearly rational ways. Let me give you an example of that. One would be the way we buy wine. When I’m buying coffee, I’m assessing one experience against the other in deciding whether it’s worth paying $3.50 or $5 for it – the coffee plus the experience attached to it.

When I buy wine it’s a totally different process. When I look at the bottle of wine and I look at the price tag, the more expensive wine is automatically going to seem better to me than the cheaper wine. So the price is going to tell me about the quality of the wine. I’m not going to decide the qualities independently and then look at the price. The price is an important factor in my evaluation of its quality.

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So if I look at a $10 bottle of wine, I will consider it inferior just because of the price tag than in a $100 bottle of wine. This is true in people that will conduct tests. They will say if they know the price of the bottle, they will say that the more expensive bottle is definitely better. But if these tests are done blinded then people often don’t know the difference between cheap and expensive wine.

Clearly here, the price is operating in a different way than in the example with the cup of coffee. Here price is providing to me an indication of the value of the thing. It can work in even quite weird ways.

There was an experiment carried out by some psychologists at MIT with placebo pills. Placebo pills are just like sugar pills. They don’t have any real therapeutic effect. There are these psychologists that gave two groups of people placebo pills and they were told that this was a pain relief pill.

One of the groups was told that the pills cost $2.50. The other group was told that the pills cost 10 cents. The groups that got the $2.50 pill or thought they were getting $2.50 worth of pain relief; they reported much deeper pain relief than the guys who got the 10 cent pills. Here, the notion of the price was operating on people at a biological level even though the pills were placebos. They didn’t really have any medicine in them.

So the price here was kind of like a crucial variable that was operating on the recipient’s psychology in a way that they cured themselves better. They felt deeper pain relief.

What is it that most of us fail to see with our most basic routine decisions that we make everyday because most of us aren’t running around thinking like that?

No. I think that the most intriguing thing to me is how prices shape cultural institutions and how we are blind to this process. I think that we kind of understand culture; the set of norms and rituals that define our social ecosystem as it were. We kind of see them as a given or that they came from somewhere we’re not quite sure where.

Our sense of right and wrong comes from, well, because things are right and things are wrong. We don’t understand them as kind of like having been borne from our transactions and our dealing with our environment. Indeed, these norms have sprung out of our transactions with our environment. In this way, they are also the subject to all these pricing decisions.

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Let me give you a very concise example of that, of sexual promiscuity. Right now, we are much more relaxed about sex before marriage than we were a hundred years ago. In fact, some government surveys in 1900 amongst 19-year-old women found that only 6% of them reported having had sex before marriage at the age of 19 in the year 1900 so 110 years ago or so.

Flash forward to the year 2000 and it’s about 75% of 19-year-old women reported having had sex outside of marriage. What’s the difference? Our mores have changed, our acceptance of sex outside of marriage changed, our culture changed.

What I would posit here is that what changed was the price or maybe better understood as the cost of premarital sex. In 1900, the potential cost to a woman of having sex outside of marriage was very, very high because there was no effective contraception, there was a fairly high chance or a much higher chance than today of getting pregnant and having to carry a baby to term. This could be extremely costly to a young woman.

Today, we have all sorts of very effective contraception and that contraception reduced the price of having sex outside of marriage. Right now, the odds of getting pregnant are very, very low. So that potential price, that potential cost is very low. As we know, the demand curve slopes downward. So, at a lower price, demand for premarital sex increases.

You’re going to have a lot of interesting topics to cover as you continue on this path. When money is no option, like for the entertainers and the athletes of the world, what impact does that have on their thinking?

Let me answer that in a couple of ways. For one, there is an interesting question. How much happiness does money provide? I would argue that most research backs the idea that more money does provide more happiness. That means people who have more money available, more resources at their disposal will report to be both happier and perhaps more importantly, they’ll also report to be more satisfied with their lives; where they are in their life.

How does that work as you get more and more money? Some scientists have suggested that satiation kicks in. Once you have a certain amount of money, getting more doesn’t make you more happy. Essentially, you have already satisfied kind of like the important needs. Every extra Bentley you get will not really improve your happiness that much.

In fact, if money improves happiness, it’s not only because of the Bentley that you can buy, it’s also because of where it puts you relative to the people that

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are around you. If you were in twice as much as your neighbors, research finds that people tend to be happier when they earn more than those that are immediately around them.

So in fact that an increase in your income or your wealth will increase your happiness but also a decrease in the wealth of your neighbors will increase your happiness. The reason for this would be that you kind of like situate yourself amongst your peers and if you think you’re better than them and if you make more money then you will tend to feel that you are better or you’re in a better place than them that will make you feel more satisfied.

But what happens is when you make more money; at first, you’re really happy because you can do more things, you can buy more stuff, you can mix with a different, you know, higher income crowd but that wears off. Eventually, you have become accustomed to the new things, the new crowd and so as your aspirations move up one level. So your happiness just goes back down.

Just to shorten this and to shorten my answer here, it would be that when money is no object having more money does not necessarily improve your life in terms of improving your happiness and improving your satisfaction. There is a possibility that there is a point where you can say, it’s enough.

That probably is a very high point because research suggests that at levels where you and I probably live, more resources, more money does provide more happiness because it lets us do more things and it reduces our uncertainties, it gives us more control over our lives. But at a certain point, presumably, satiation kicks in and more money doesn’t make you happier.

Let me answer also in a different way. At some point, prices are not a signal of the value of what you’re buying but they are meant to signal the value of the buyer. Let’s just think for an instance of the art market.

When somebody buys a Picasso and pays 100 million dollars for it, what that person is doing is sending a signal throughout the world in which he or she lives, about their own worth, their own value. They are somebody who can spend 100 million dollars on a painting. This might sound as trivial and frivolous but it’s not necessarily so.

A social scientist in the United States called Thorstein Veblen created this concept or articulated the concept of conspicuous consumption as a way to signal power and to tell everybody around you that you are the most powerful person in the group. The idea would be that if you can spend on stuff that is absolutely pointless; if you can spend tons of money on something that really

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doesn’t generate tons of happiness, say like 200 million dollars for a Picasso which is something that’s going to be hanging on a wall that you might not even look at. Or worse, it might be put in a vault that you’re not ever going to go in to.

Basically, what you’re doing is proving to others the power you have over them. Biologists have looked at this idea and given it a further twist. They kind of liked compared this kind of buying the Picasso to the tail of a peacock. A peacock tail is like buying a Picasso for 100 million dollars. It’s an enormous expense for the peacock in terms of energy and it produces no increase in its chances of survival. In fact, it probably lowers its chances of survival because whatever eats peacocks probably can catch them easier because they are carrying this very heavy tail behind them.

But this peacock tail does serve a purpose. It’s not just frivolous. The purpose is to show all the pea hens in the mating market that they are so fit, that these peacocks are so fit, that they can spend a lot of energy in a really pointless thing which is this tail. It’s a thing that really doesn’t help them at all but still they’ll spend all this energy on it. That must mean that their genes are very, very good. They are very fit peacocks. So they must be great mates and their chicks must be very high quality.

So this kind of spray of color is actually very useful for the peacock in the mating market. I would suggest of things like the 100 million dollar Picasso or there was this one guy in Abu Dhabi that a couple of years ago paid 14 million dollars for a license plate. This deployment of money is designed to signal the quality of the buyer.

Where money is no object, money becomes a signal of the power of the person rather than a tool to buy things that are cool or neat or useful.

That’s a great point because I wanted to get your perspective on this whole notion of happiness. I realize that as a society, we’re certainly not as happy as we could be especially in the times that we’re living in today. Your conclusions actually surprise me. Can we really quantify happiness?

Well, people try. There are ways to do it. The most typical way, I mean, there is a few ways that social scientists go about it. One is to ask people to rank their satisfaction with their life or their happiness on a scale of 1 to 10; 10 being like super happy and 1 being super sad. People will give an answer. This answer does relate to other real things. It’s not totally arbitrary and pointless.

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For instance, people that report being happier also have longer life expectancy. They are less prone to disease. So higher self-reported happiness does relate to objective measures of well being such as mental or physical health and longevity. So it can be measured. Since it can be measured, it can be related to other things like our use of time, our income, our social relations because clearly money does improve happiness but other things do as well.

When you look at, for instance, the United States is an interesting example. The United States has become very, very rich over the past 60 years or so. The baby boom after World War II in this country was remarkable. So people’s incomes increased a lot.

Interestingly, if you look at self-reported happiness and how it has evolved over that period of time, it has not increased. It has been pretty much slack. This is a paradox. How come we got so rich and money does help people feel more satisfied but our happiness didn’t improve?

I suggest that there are two probable answers to that. One is that the distribution of our income has become more and more skewed. So actually the people that have reaped – this is mostly a recent phenomenon. This part of the explanation doesn’t really operate over 60 years but it does operate over 30 years.

That all these extra income that the United States has generated has accrued to a very small share of the population. For many, many people in the United States this is not true. Their incomes have not risen. I think that the inequality of the distribution of reward has played a role in this stagnation of satisfaction and happiness.

Another reason is that to increase income in this way, we have also traded away something. I think that perhaps a crucial variable here is time because having more free time has also been found pretty clearly to increase our happiness and having less free time reduces our happiness. So spending a lot of time on the commute; spending very little time with your family, with your children, or on vacation or reading or what not, that reduces your happiness.

The enormous income jump in the United States has also been accompanied by an enormous jump in the number of hours at work. More than any other industrial country the workload of the typical American has increased a lot. We work now more than the Japanese, French, English, Swede, Italian, Spanish, German; pretty much anybody you can think of. We work more and more hours. We have fewer vacations and so on. I think that this has cost us happiness. Even as we become wealthier and that extra wealth increases our satisfaction,

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our available time has fallen and that has decreased our satisfaction. These things kind of like trade off.

Eduardo, what message do you have for those people out there who are not doing what they love? If happiness is going to be quantified, I’m sure each of us can quantify it. There are a lot of people especially where you live in New York City and certainly the East Coast where there is a lot of people who are working in jobs that they don’t love. In fact, some of them are miserable at their jobs.

There are several ways to answer that. These people have made a trade. They have a price to their satisfaction at work as it were. The income that they are getting from that job is presumably worth it to them to have a job that is less than satisfactory or less than fantastic. They are accepting this kind of like humdrum existence in exchange for a paycheck. I can’t tell them that they’re wrong for doing this.

They could if they are willing to take risks, if they are in a situation to take risks perhaps if they are single, not yet married, that they are in a better situation to take risks than if they have a large family to support. Perhaps it’s worth it for them to risk this tradeoff for a better trade. But it is a risk.

What I would tell them is that they should perhaps evaluate their trade. They should introspect and look at, well listen, is this trade acceptable for me? Is this paycheck worth this humdrum or awful routine and look at it this way? I would just like to comment on that.

The notion that we are stuck in bad situations and that we should just shake out of them and get into better situations kind of like assumes that our choices are always made in freedom — that we have freedom of choice. This is only partially true. All our choices are constrained.

Our choices are constrained by the jobs that are available in the market which is perhaps also a function of where the economy is. They are constrained by our family situation. They are constrained by our level of education. They are constrained by a bunch of things. We’re not entirely free in all of our choices. I think that that’s probably one of the great fallacies that underlie the American dream that everybody can be what they want to be. It’s this lack of recognition of the constraints in which our choices are made.

I totally agree. In fact, I come from a finance background so when you talk about your thinking about the most important currency is opportunity and that evaluating opportunity cost, we organize our lives.

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One of the thoughts that really came through my mind was there is a lot of people unconsciously running around not even thinking about opportunity cost. They are not thinking about opportunity cost when they buy their coffee, when they buy their car, when they make their everyday decisions. That’s a real interesting conversation. That’s something that is not happening in the minds of people. They are not analyzing the opportunity cost when they buy their $5 cup of coffee upstairs.

Every choice has an opportunity cost in it. Assessing opportunity cost is really difficult because you have to contemplate a bunch of counterfactuals. I spent the five bucks on the pizza. What is the cost of that? Well, all the other things I could have used those five bucks on. What are all the other things that I could – that’s an enormous universe of potential things I could have done with $5. Would any of those made me happier than the pizza?

Making this cost-benefit analysis is not always easy. I’m choosing an easy example, five bucks in a slice of pizza but say, going to college – just looking at the financial labor market for a few years. And then on the other hand, it’s the benefit of the extra income I will reap after I get out of college and get a job with a higher level of income. And I have to do in that present value calculations of that because the spread of the extra income is going to spread out throughout my entire career.

This is not an easy calculation. Just to give your listeners a hint of the answer. The answer is go to college because by any measure the financial reward outweighs the cost by a substantial margin. Imagine sitting there, looking at this for the first time and trying to make this assessment. It’s not easy. Or getting married or having a kid – all these big decisions about life – joining a religious faith. These things involve costs and benefits. We sometimes don’t take the decisions without kind of like assessing the cost and the benefits.

Let me ask you something about another thing that fascinated me was your discovery that a human life is worth 7.5 million dollars. That for me, who comes from this financial background, was really, really intriguing.

Actually, just to start, since then the EPA has increased the price tag. It’s now above 9 million dollars. In fact, all government departments in over the last year or so, government departments in the United States have been ratcheting up the price that they put on life.

This is interesting in so many ways. Like, you mean a life is worth 9 million dollars, how come? To me my life is worth an infinite amount. I would spend

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every single penny I have to save my life or the life of my child. Clearly, this is a matter of a frame of reference.

A good way to think of it is like think of some stranger walking down the street and you’re told that you can pay to save that person’s life. That person is dying of cancer in the next year and paying through your insurance premium or your taxes, you can pay for a treatment that will prolong this person’s life by five years.

But then you’re asked how much would you pay in higher insurance premiums or higher taxes for this? Would you pay $10,000? Would you pay $100,000? Would you pay 10 million dollars? The moment you say, “Stop, that’s too much.” You have essentially put a price; an upper bound on the price of this stranger.

That’s what essentially governments around the world do because they have to assess whether they want to spend their budgets on a new school, on an environmental project to save the red woods or on a new healthcare facility or a fire station.

To make these assessments, they need to value where they are going to get more social bang for the buck in order to be able to compare more redwood trees or higher education levels in a community with higher life expectancy. In another community, they need to use a common currency which is money. That’s why they put a price on the lives of people. As you suggested, the EPA’s price tag now, I think it’s about 9.5 million dollars.

When the Twin Towers came down and Congress set up this fund to compensate the victims, they had the special master, Ken Feinberg who ran this fund. He had to also decide what’s the price of each victim so I can pay their family this amount.

The way that he did it was he looked at people’s salaries basically and looked at their life expectancy and figured, okay, you’re 40 years old, you earn a million dollars a year, you’re expected to live another 40 years so you’re worth 40 million dollars. I mean, not quite because you’ve got to look at the effect of time and so on but roughly that’s the way that this was calculated. The price that people was their wage over time.

Feinberg knew that this was going to lead to an extremely unequal payment because there were janitors that died and there were bankers that died. So imagine the wage differential there. So he kind of like massaged some of the high payments down and massaged some of the low payments up. But still he was left with an extremely disparate – I mean, the top payment was 6.4 million

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dollars and the bottom payment $250,000. There were really cheap deaths and really expensive deaths.

There were also other weird things like the typical payment for female victims was about two-thirds for a male victim. The families of men in their 30s who died in the attacks were given about 3.8 million dollars each. But the relatives of men over the age 70 were given less than $600,000 each.

So there were all these strange inequalities in payment which had to do with the wages of the people. It’s kind of like the value of your life has to do with what you make in your job which struck a lot of people as very unfair.

It is very interesting. What role does fear have to play in our decision making?

Enormous. That’s one of the key tools with which we assess the unknown, with which we assess risk probabilities.

Let’s say your assessment as to whether you should get married. You’re going to trade away some thing that you feel that you know that you have which is the life of the single person. Whatever joys and costs that you know.

You’re going to trade that off against the prospective joys of marriage which are presumably children and hopefully enduring love. There is an element of risk taking in making this choice. Fear is one of the components of our appetite for risk. It’s our desire for the reward of the unknown and our fear of the downside of the unknown.

When you’re trading prospective things, fear is an essential tool. So people with different fear levels are going to make different choices. It’s called risk appetite in the financial markets.

When you think about this whole notion from a consumer’s perspective and from a marketing perspective, what advice would you have for entrepreneurs out there of consumer product companies?

My advice for the consumers would be pay attention to what you’re doing because the marketers are going to take advantage when you do not. My advice for the marketers would be pay attention to your consumer’s behavior because they make a lot of decisions with incomplete assessments of costs and benefits and this provides the opportunities for you.

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One example of this is how grocery shops distribute their products strategically throughout their retail space so that it makes it difficult for consumers to compare the prices of things that the owner of the supermarket doesn’t want consumers to compare.

For instance, the cheap cereal will likely not be in the same part of the store with the fancy organic cereal because the store owner doesn’t want the person considering the more expensive organic product to suddenly see this cheaper thing right next to it and maybe change his or her mind and go for the lower cost item.

These things will be segregated away so that people who have more of a price sensitivity, people who are more thrifty about their shopping will go to one part of the store and so the retailers will be able to sell essentially the same product cereal at two different prices to two different types of consumers; the thrifty and the less price conscious. Price discrimination is an important tool for businesses. It kind of like relies partly on making the product slightly different. In one case, it’s organic cereal in the other case, it’s not organic.

Thinking of a different example, Broadway tickets, the way that you segregate your markets when you’re selling Broadway tickets is the people who want to buy cheap Broadway tickets must line up in Times Square on the day of the show be it snowing, raining, or what not and stand in line there and they’ll be able to buy a cheap ticket for the day of the show.

Whereas if you want to buy it online comfortably using your credit card for a few days down the road, you’re going to have to pay full price. That’s a way where the Broadway theaters can sell their theater tickets to the thrifty at one price and to the less worried about money at a different price but the product is slightly different.

It’s the way how you manage information. You don’t want everybody to know how much each person is paying for something because that could kind of like short circuit your process. Even though we all sort of suspect the person sitting next to us on the plane paid a different fare than we did because airlines are very sophisticated about pricing their products in different ways to different people, we don’t really know this. I suspect that if this was totally advertised and everybody knew what everybody else were paying, there would be an enormous revolution and great hatred against the airlines.

Do you feel exclusivity is still a status symbol in America?

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Yes of course. Exclusivity will always be valued. This is part of what I was referring to earlier when I suggested that paying for the Bentley or a hundred million dollars for the Picasso tells other people about my value.

It’s not that the Picasso necessarily, that piece of art necessarily, is worth a hundred million dollars. What I’m telling people is I’m a person who can spend a hundred million dollars. That makes me part of a very rarified group that holds a lot of power and sending that signal is valuable to me.

Maybe a more prosaic example would be in the early days of the iPhone when the app store was in its infancy. There is this German developer who created an app called the "I Am Rich" app. This app cost $999 which was the most one could pay in the Apple store. The only thing it did was flash a picture of a gem and say, "I am rich." That’s all it did. It did nothing.

You’re kidding me. I have never even heard of that.

The interesting thing is that this app only lasted a day in the store because then the censors at Apple decided it wasn’t a good thing to have or something and they took it down. That one day it was up it was purchased by eight people. There were people who found value in sending this signal which is spending $999 on something absolutely pointless. Why is that worth it? Well, because they can. I am paying this because I can. The fact that I can makes me a more valuable chic powerful person.

So yes, exclusivity is absolutely – I think that exclusivity has been valuable always regardless of kind of like the economic system that we live in. It will always be valuable.

My last question is about you. How has this research and your work – I mean this topic is going to continually evolve. I really believe behavioral economics is going to be a big topic but how has it impacted your thinking whether it’s in decision making or just overall?

I think it’s made me a more careful person. I tend to second guess my decisions much more than I used to. Every time I’m doing something I will stop for a beat at least to assess, to try to figure out why it is I’m doing something. I try not to kid myself about why it is that I’m making a certain choice. Why did I stop buying coffee at this store?

Going back to coffee, there is this one moment where I was having this wonderful coffee at a really nice little store that I love that was half a block from my house and it was great coffee and it cost $2.75 which was cheaper

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than anywhere else. One day, they increased the price to $3.50 which is roughly what you pay anywhere in Manhattan for coffee.

I was furious and I stopped buying their coffee. I felt totally right not to buy their coffee. I feel this is outrageous. They are acting like a big evil corporation. I thought they were like nice grungy young folks. They had graffiti on the walls of their coffee shop.

On second thought, reflecting on – why is it that I’m doing this? Actually, my outrage is not letting me see that I am still getting a good deal because their coffee is still better than any other coffee that I’ve had in the city and they are not charging me more than anybody else. So it’s still a better deal than buying it at Starbucks. I said, I have forgiven them. I’m trying to be more careful about why I make the choices I do.

Eduardo, tell people how they can find you. Obviously, they can find you in the New York Times editorial sections. Tell people how they can find you. How they can get the book and where this is leading to because I know it’s certainly the beginning?

The book is available all over the place. You can find it in Barnes & Noble, on Amazon, and all these other spots. It’s on Kindle, on the Apple eBook thing.

You can find me and in fact you can read the introduction to the book on my website which is www.EduardoPorter.com. I have a little blog there which riffs on price related things. The introduction to the book is there. There is also a little video about the book up there.

If you’re interested in exploring what I wrote that would be a good place to start. Where this is going to, I don’t know. I’m certainly going to write another one. I don’t know when and I don’t know exactly what the topic is going to be but I have certain ideas.

I hope you continue to do that. I appreciate your time. One of the things I also want to mention is on your website www.EduardoPorter.com there is a ton of interviews that you have listed there that people can really not only get a better understanding of this topic but really get your thinking on it.

That’s right. I put a lot of the interviews that I’ve had since the publication of the book up there. This one will be on there as well if it’s possible.

It will definitely be possible.

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The Price of Everything (Unplugged) Eduardo Porter with Moe Abdou !

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