Ellen Ruppel Shell has been studying the price, the value and the cost of things—all sorts of things, bookcases and summer dresses and plastic wrap and key chains and tube socks and hammers. And shrimp, the subject of a brief, appalling tale that illustrates what she’s up to in this important book. Until the 1970s or so, shrimp was a luxury for most Americans. Thanks to a huge boom in shrimp farming, especially in Thailand, supplies soared during the ’80s, and prices started to fall. Now, Ruppel Shell reports in Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, we eat shrimp as casually as we eat tuna fish—more casually, in fact, since our consumption of shrimp actually outstrips our consumption of canned tuna. If you order shrimp at a midrange restaurant like Red Lobster, you get a hefty portion for about $16—and if you’re there during the annual “Endless Shrimp” promotion, you can keep on ordering until you topple right over into the garlic butter. It’s still only $16.

The downside? According to Ruppel Shell, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, it’s all downside, and billions of rubbery shrimp are the least of it. For a while, there were some newly affluent shrimp-farmers along the coast of Thailand as traditional operations were transformed into gigantic factories with the help of international lenders and investors. Massive onslaughts of chemicals made the factories productive, but fish—like cows and pigs and chickens—do not flourish in the long run under such extreme, artificial conditions. They get sick, and their ponds become black holes of pollution and toxic waste. ... (Read the full review)

It starts out innocently.

There's a party. You need an outfit. It's summer sale season in a recession. No-brainer! Two birds with one card: You will bolster both the economy and your own bottom line by finding yourself the bargain of the century.

Off to the department store you go, armed with only your wallet and a vague idea of something splashy, flashy, spangly, stripy or demure. Whatever it is, it's going to change your life—and for half-price or less.

But when you get there the shop is uncomfortably crowded, nothing looks quite right. Undaunted, you try on some party clothes, but the waistbands dig, the hemlines droop, the colours fade under the fluorescent lights. ... (Read the full review)

My mother still owns, and uses, the same vacuum cleaner she bought early in her marriage, just after World War II. She still lives in the house my father—not a carpenter by trade, but an electrician—built in the early 1950s with the help of his brothers, a small but sturdy Cape Cod-style dwelling with hardwood floors and solid wood doors that close with a hearty, satisfying clunk (as opposed to the echoey click of hollow-core doors). Today the idea of anything—a household appliance, a piece of furniture, a house—being built to last is almost laughable. When your vacuum cleaner stops sucking, you most likely haul it out to the curb and trek to Target or a big-box home-goods store to replace it. Even if you could readily find someone to repair it, the trouble and the cost would be prohibitive. If you need a bookcase, there's always IKEA: Sure, you'd prefer to buy a sturdily built hardwood version that doesn't buckle under the weight of actual books, but who has extra dough to spend on stuff like that? The IKEA bookcase is good enough, for now if not forever.

That cycle of consumption seems harmless enough, particularly since we live in a country where there are plenty of cheap goods to go around. But in her lively and terrifying book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, Ellen Ruppel Shell pulls back the shimmery, seductive curtain of low-priced goods to reveal their insidious hidden costs. Those all-you-can-eat Red Lobster shrimps may very well have come from massive shrimp-farming spreads in Thailand, where they've been plumped up with antibiotics and possibly tended by maltreated migrant workers from Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam. ... (Read the full review)

Correspondent for The Atlantic and author of a 2002 report on the obesity epidemic (The Hungry Gene), Ellen Ruppel Shell explores complicated issues by delving into their history, putting them in a broad social context and delivering the occasional zingy one-liner. Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture (Penguin Press, $22.95), for example, warns us that "sometimes what looks like a bargain is really just a bad loan." . . .

Q. What attracted you to this topic?

A. It was my own predilection to look for bargains. I'm probably more deal-prone than the average person, and I was often disappointed because the things I bought were of such low quality that I wore them once and they ended up in the back of my closet. I'm a rational person, my background is in science, and yet I kept on doing this.

Q. One of your points is that we buy cheap things and expect to throw them away. Are you trying to change that attitude?

A. It's important that people understand the connection between low prices and low wages. The irony is, we spend more and more as prices go down and down. Fixed costs like housing and health care have become extremely expensive, while consumer goods have become so cheap that people involved not just in the production but in every aspect of the distribution and marketing—journalists at newspapers that have lost advertising revenue, for example—have to take steep pay cuts. ... (Read the full interview)