The economic case for self-interest at the outer limits of being morally good.

Modern life is an exercise in discomfort. In the face of endless injustice, how much selfishness is permissible? How do we square suffering elsewhere with our hope to thrive at home? How does one strive for the greater good while guarding one's personal interests? The Price of Our Values argues that the answers to these questions are economic: by weighing our sense of the personal costs associated with the outer limits of our moral beliefs.

These tradeoffs—the want to be good, the personal costs of being good, and the points at which people abandon goodness due to its costs—are somewhat unsettling. But as economists Augustin Landier and David Thesmar show, they are highly predictable, even justified. Our values guide us, but we are also forced to consider economic costs to settle decisions.

The Price of Our Values is an economic reckoning with the universal unease of contemporary moral life. Wielding insights from the philosophical founders of the field, Landier and Thesmar provide frameworks for thinking about the place of values—justice, freedom, beauty— in the decisions of modern life. They do so in terms that seek to be consistent with both our good intentions and their limits.

Augustin Landier is professor of finance at HEC Paris. He has previously taught at the Toulouse School of Economics, New York University, and the University of Chicago and served as a member of the French Council of Economic Analysis. In 2014, he was named “France’s Best Young Economist” by Le Monde. David Thesmar is the Franco Modigliani Professor of Financial Economics and professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has previously served as a member of the French Council of Economic Analysis. In 2007, he was named “France’s Best Young Economist” by Le Monde. With Augustin Landier, he writes a regular column for the French daily newspaper Les Echos.