The Price of Our Values: The Economic Limits of Moral Life, by AugustinLandier and DavidThesmar (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2025), pp. Xiv + 191. ISBN‐13: 978‐0‐22682708‐7 (cloth); ISBN‐13: 978‐0‐22682709‐4 (e‐book)

If you think that economics, as a science, has nothing to do with and should stay away from moral and political judgements, then you should read this book. If you think that economics is the enemy of morality and that economic reasoning can induce policy-makers to make awful decisions, then you should also read this book. These two beliefs are opposite sides of the same idea, namely, that economics and ethics belong to realms that have nothing to do with one another, that should better be separate, and not contaminate each other. There are various versions of this idea (the ‘science-deals-only-with-facts’ version, the ‘economics-does-not-describe-real-human-beings’ version, etc.), but they all share one common assumption: that economic and moral reasoning are irreconcilable and that not much can be gained by trying to bring them closer. Augustine Landier and David Thesmar have written a book that shows in several ways how the separation of economics from ethics is impossible and undesirable. The book is relatively lean, written in a clear, non-technical fashion, and is full of examples for readers to see concretely why some of the most urgent policy problems that we ought to solve with the help of social science require the joint application of economic and moral thinking. The title suggests, somewhat misleadingly, that Landier and Thesmar support only one side of the argument – the necessity of using more economic thinking to correct moral reasoning. On the contrary, most of the book is devoted to arguing that moral reasoning ought to complement economic thinking. (The Economic Limits of Moral Life and the Moral Limits of Economic Life would have been a more accurate, albeit less catchy, subtitle.) The book consists of an opening chapter that lays out the general argument for the complementarity of economic and moral reasoning, followed by eight chapters devoted to specific domains where this complementarity is particularly important. The readers are taken on a tour from international trade to college admissions, climate change, globalisation, stockholders' responsibility, ethical finance, and more. Each case gives the authors an opportunity to introduce different ethical theories and to illustrate how they can influence our judgement about the way the problems should be solved, sometimes in different and conflicting ways. But Landier and Thesmar are particularly interested in the conflicts between economic and moral reasoning, which can drive deep wedges in our political communities. An explicit goal of the book is to help readers understand that these conflicts are real – in the sense that there are genuinely good reasons on both sides – and that leaning on one side or the other should not be interpreted as evidence of moral failure or (symmetrically) of sanctimonious fanaticism. In an era of dangerous polarisation, this is a commendable goal. Many people who lack training in economics struggle to see the roundabout ways in which apparently good intentions rooted in strongly held ethical principles can nonetheless have disastrous social consequences. On the other side, professional economists shock the public with recommendations that – because they are counterintuitive and contradict entrenched moral convictions – fail to persuade and foster the image of economics as an immoral science. Landier and Thesmar show convincingly that these recommendations are counterintuitive because they are typically partial and incomplete. By ignoring non-economic reasons, they cannot and should not constitute the whole basis for our social and individual decisions. The authors do not offer a formula or even a method to resolve the conflicts between economic and ethical considerations. They aim primarily at making their readers familiar with the nature and diversity of the reasons that fuel the conflicts. In this, they succeed: The Price of Our Values is an excellent pedagogical tool which I strongly recommend for both undergraduate and graduate teaching. Nonetheless, the problem of reconciling different forms of reasoning remains important. Landier and Thesmar promote the use of surveys to measure people's sensitivity to economic and moral arguments. (Several survey questions and results collected by the authors are provided in the book.) They describe elicited moral judgements with the term ‘preference’, probably because it is a familiar concept for an audience of economists or economic students. This choice – which follows a successful recent tradition in economic theory – is, however, problematic. Preferences, as economists normally use the term, are overall evaluations that take the properties of different options into account and weigh their relative importance in case of conflict (e.g., when you ponder whether you should buy the fatty, tasty milk or the skimmed, bland one and eventually opt for the latter). So-called moral preferences, in contrast, are usually driven by social norms and tend to be simultaneously more fragile (because context-dependent) and more rigid (because based on higher principles); hence, not amenable to trade-off reasoning. In spite of social preference theorists' propaganda, they are also notoriously unstable, and, as such, they constitute a poor starting point for a social scientist interested in knowing what people ‘really’ think about a specific policy question. And in any case, the problem of conflict across people remains: what if my ‘preferences’ do not agree with yours? How are we going to reconcile my overall judgement that economic reasons should have decisive weight in a given context with your moral concerns? The concept of Pareto efficiency – proposed at the beginning of the twentieth century – was considered an escape route from this problem, based on the idea that conflicts of values should be solved by politicians, rather than by economists. We now know that this solution is flawed, that even the Paretian concept of efficiency is far from ethically neutral, and that social scientists should better learn to deal with values in their work. The Price of Our Values can contribute significantly to increasing the awareness of economists. It reflects major changes in the discipline of economics that have occurred during the last three decades, which have made it a more diverse, interdisciplinary, and less dogmatic science. The fact that the book has been written by a pair of established economists working in major research universities hopefully will help make it appealing to the members of the profession. But philosophers should also find it useful as a source of excellent examples, as an antidote against moral arrogance, and as an incentive to address the ultimate problem that we face as collective decision-makers: What political procedures or social mechanisms should we use to reconcile conflicting moral and economic reasons, recognising their respective legitimacy and appropriate weight? We might not be close to a satisfactory answer yet, but thinking about it in a clear, informed, constructive way – as Landier and Thesmar do – is a necessary condition for at least trying. The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.