Selected Product:
| The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Paperback
Edition: 1st
Author: Naomi Klein
Publisher: Picador
Release Date: 2008-06-24
ISBN-10: 0312427999
ISBN-13: 9780312427993
List Price: $16.00
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
In this groundbreaking alternative history of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free-market economic revolution, Naomi Klein challenges the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory. From Chile in 1973 to Iraq today, Klein shows how Friedman and his followers have repeatedly harnessed terrible shocks and violence to implement their radical policies. As John Gray wrote in The Guardian, "There are very few books that really help us understand the present. The Shock Doctrine is one of those books."
Not one single fact in the entire text
| Customer Rating:  | | I certaintly hope that nobody actually considers Klein an expert on economics. This book contained many fanciful tales and creative history, but I challenge the author and her fans to point out one single true fact in the entire book. Klein cannot make a decent argument without instantly resorting to the same tired tabloid approach of re-writing actual history and events to fit her argument. This contains the same anti-capitalist themes and overtones you'll find in a 2nd year college essay. |
Amazing
| Customer Rating: | | Great information and told in a way that can really penetrate. A wake up call! |
Conclusions not based on adequate evidence
| Customer Rating: | Naomi Klein is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. She tries to claim free market economic policies can only be imposed undemocratically and makes a not very compelling argument linking proponents of free market economics and physical torture. The book is only convincing if one is largely ignorant of the real facts surrounding Klien's case study analyses.
The book is so full of holes, it is difficult to know where to begin. It focuses on examples of economic policy decisions by various nations around the globe. Since many of her examples suffer from the same flaws, I'll focus on one. In Klein's discussion of the new post-apartheid government of South Africa in the mid-1990s, she lambastes it for not embarking on radical reforms she favors. According to Klein, it should have repudiated debts, nationalized industries, given politicians the power to run the central bank and printed money to meet spending demands above what taxes or borrowing might have brought in, among other things. The new government was dominated by the Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, which was hardly the right-wing entity but it did adopt a pragmatic program and a decade and half later it is one of the most prosperous countries in Africa, but Klein judges its record as "scandalous." Curiously, another country that borders South Africa did adopt many of her recommendations. Yet the name "Zimbabwe" appears nowhere in the text of the book. Perhaps it if had, Klein would have had to explain how hyperinflation and a collapsed economy are good things. It isn't that Klien's analysis is always wrong, but rather the evidence used is so selective, it is clear that she arrives a conclusion and looks for evidence to support it and ignores anything that might contradict it, rather than determining a conclusion based on available evidence.
Klein simply doesn't care about or doesn't understand the trade offs in economic policy. In the 1980s, governments in Latin America were hit by bouts of hyperinflation as governments printed money to finance spending. She admits the hyperinflation is a bad thing but acts as though it occurred spontaneously in a vacuum and then attacks the successful measures that were taken to tame it. As an alternative of the actual strategy to combat hyperinflation in the case of Bolivia, she offers a vapid alternative that seeks "mobilize support and share the burden through a negotiated process involving key stakeholders." Well, that sounds well and good, but she offers no examples of that approach taming hyperinflation. What is more, the mobilization and strikes in opposition to the anti-inflation polices suggest some stakeholders weren't exactly willing to cooperate, thus, what she really offers is no alternative at all. Which gets to one of central weaknesses in Klein's argument, trade offs can't just be wished away. State-owned industries may be fine and dandy but if the government is going bankrupt trying to keep them afloat, refusing to alter the status quo isn't an option. Klein has an almost religious faith in the state to wave a wand and do good (which is not to say it does do no good, just it isn't as capable a Klein would have her readers believe). Rather than acknowledging real world choices, Klein deems every rollback of state power is some hidden corporate conspiracy.
A more realistic look at developmental policies is provided "In Defense of Globalization" by Jagdish Bhagwati.
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Shock Doctrine
| Customer Rating: | | I have very little Economy in my background but like the theme and her writing but after 8 chapters I hope to bring things together as I agree with what she is saying. Corporate America is and has been responsible for much of our ills today. |
Important reading for contemporary understanding today.
| Customer Rating: | | This book gets my highest rating. Probably one of the most important books I've read on contemporary culture. Ranks up there with Noam Chomsky and G. Edward Griffin's "The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve". READ THIS BOOK !!! |
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