Every ordinary price is a verdict on a hidden contest.
The argument of the volume
This is the first volume of Numéraire, a series built on a single conjecture: that every ordinary price is a verdict on a hidden contest. A price looks like a fact — a number the world hands us — but it is the settlement of a struggle we have mostly stopped noticing, and to read it rightly is to recover the contest it records. No price is more ordinary, or more freighted, than the wage. It is what an hour of a person's working life can be exchanged for, and it reaches nearly everyone who has ever worked.
The volume asks one question in twelve forms. Is a wage what the work is worth, or what the worker has the power to claim? The first answer is the comfortable one, taught in the textbooks and felt as justice: each is paid the value of what they produce. The second is harder, and — this volume argues — truer: worth sets only a ceiling, the worker's alternatives set a floor, and where in the space between the wage actually comes to rest is decided by power, by who can walk away and who cannot.
Twelve plates put that claim to the test, descending from the single bargain to the market, the institution, the machine, and at last the income of a nation. They find the contest at every scale, and find power the quiet victor more often than the comfortable story admits. What follows is the anatomy of a price — and, in the end, an argument that the wage was never simply a measure of worth, but a standing question of power, and so a thing a society is free to answer differently.