ABSTRACT
Planning a trip, I took a night school course in Italian. The instructor said we needed to know only five words to get by as tourists: "Quanto costo in dollars?" and, whatever the response, "Troppo!" (too much). Economic planners can get by with the first four. (Their bosses often add the fifth.)
Price is "the amount of money for which anything is bought, sold, or offered for sale." Robert Walpole, an eighteenth-century English politician, observed of his colleagues, "All men have their price." The dominant planning model goes further: everything has its price.
