The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Book Review: Outright Distortions and Twisted Reality: An Anti Free-Market Screed
Summary: 1 Stars
I was not aware that Ms. Klein was a non-English speaker. How else could one explain her complete misinterpretation of Milton Friedman? Either she does not understand Milton Friedman's own words or she purposely chooses to distort the meaning.
Save yourself a few dollars and hours of wasted time. Skip this book and instead read Milton Friedman's far superior classic, "Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition."
Yes, I agree, there were many bad players during the 2008 economic meltdown leading to "the Great Recession." Don't forget that the U.S. federal government played a significant role in the fiasco ranging from the lack of SEC enforcment of existing securities laws to the lack of Congressional oversight of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the many failings of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank and Treasury to the long-term effects of deficit spending and heavy borrowing from foreign countries. However, NONE of these failings originated from Friedman's market-based philosophies or policies.
There is a very simple test of Mr. Freidman's ideas. Which policies were more prosperous for its population, China under the Communist ideals of Mao (the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, 30 million dead) or China under the market-based reforms of Deng (the most-recent Asian economic miracle)? Which policies were more proposerous for its population, East Germany under socialist rule, or East Germany after reunification with the market-based West?
The many flaws of Ms. Klein's book are well discussed in the following article. Google the following text.
"Defaming Milton Friedman: Naomi Klein's disastrous yet popular polemic against the great free market economist"
Book Review: What History Didn't Tell Us
Summary: 5 Stars
This is what I consider to be one of the most important books on how the U.S. has manipulated foreign governments over the past three decades. Naomi Klein is an amazing journalist. Her research is thorough, her analysis impeccable. I was either ignorant most of my life or these events were just not reported with any degree of thoroughness.
The central ogre in all of our mayhem has been Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of Economics. The Chicago Boys started with Pinochet taking over Chili in the early 70s. The central theme has been to privatize all state-owned institutions (and everything else they could grab) and sell them to (largely U.S.) companies at pennies on the dollar. In the process, it required laying off sometimes hundreds of thousands of locals, plunging the respective country into sever poverty (The Shock Doctrine), disappearing and torturing dissidents (the other shock doctrine), even utilizing genocide. This was done under the cloak of bringing democracy to the country, but actually was instituted to bring heavy handed capitalism.
From Chili, we moved to the "Southern Cone", which included Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Brazil. Then, taking the hint, Margaret Thatcher used the same principals to create and win a war in the Falklands, which was successful in getting her re-elected despite her plunging support in Britain. Believe it or not, the break-up of the USSR was considered a similar "opportunity", and Gorbachov was kicked out, Yeltsin let in (easily manipulated). The only difference in Russia was that they "de-socialized" the country by selling to rich Russians instead of to U.S. and other ultra-national countries. Yet, Chicago Boys economists still got paid big bucks to lead the economic revolution in Russia, just they had in the other countries.
We heard that we were going to Iraq because of WMD. Then it was about freedom. Rumors were that it was about oil. What it really was encompassed the same greed-inspired attempt to sell off all the state-owned operations to private companies - Halliburton, Bechtel and others at the top of the list. Locals were not employed in their own operations, but instead, foreigners were brought in as employees, while locals were left impoverished. The only problem with Iraq was that the people responded with unanticipated gusto to thwart Bremer's attempts to privatize (under guidance of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld). So, major players pulled out after earning billions in wasted efforts to bring back infrastructure to the country. Interestingly, all these "contractors" were paid on a cost plus basis, guaranteeing them profit on their work with no downside for failure.
I sincerely recommend you get this book. It's dense reading, but you can't go more than a couple of pages without voicing profanities. I can't help but keep a highlighter handy.
Book Review: A WONDERFUL BOOK
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the best books I have ever read. I got it from the library, twice, then bought it from Amazon. The book seems kind of heavy for its size. Maybe because it is packed with so much interesting information.Book Review: Amazing but scary book
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is at the same time very scary and very exciting. The book starts out slowly talking about things like electric shock therapy experiments done decades ago and you wonder what this has to do with the goal of the book to talk about economic issues. However, by the end of the book, the theme of shock therapy is well-cultivated. In any case, this book represents an ambitious project. It basically attempts to view the period from the late 1960s through the present from the perspective of what it calls Chicago School Capitalism. The author traces worldwide attempts to install a free-wheeling laissez faire type capitalism via shocks of one kind or another. She details many kinds of shocks ranging from military coups featuring brutal repression to man-made or natural disasters. The basic crux of the story is that in one country after another, a shock to citizens was utilized to bring a massive wave of privatization, social spending cuts and deregulation. This policy was advocated by the famous almost god-like economist Milton Friedman, but rather than praise the strategy, the author points out how in instance after instance this led to severe economic poverty for large sectors of the population and many other negative effects. She details how many international agencies and governments were in on the process from the US government to the IMF and World Bank. Just when the reader becomes severely depressed over the bleak picture, she ends the book with a hopeful section pointing out how many areas have managed to turn this around into a new third way that offers real hope and significant protection from future shocks.
The thing I liked best about this book is that it offers a coherent narrative that makes sense of all the things I have seen on the news in my life, which roughly covers the same time period as this book. Obviously, real life isn't so neat and clean as to perfectly fit a well-constructed 600 page synopsis of 40 years of world history, but this is a good attempt to make sense out of something that can seem confusing. For me there is a real disconnect, in many cases, between the high-minded rhetoric of free markets and unfettered capitalism and the results we see in the real world. I think everyone suspects that things don't work out as neatly as promised. We can see hints of trouble all around even though there is a constant veneer of success held up in the media when talking about the places where these shock-based free-market experiments took place. This book presents a viewpoint that makes a lot of these things appear more coherent. For example, if you view Iraq as a free-market experiment and not as a project in democracy and security, what happened there makes more sense.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who is genuinely concerned about the world economy and the direction that society is taking. It's probably not a book for those who want to view the world in polar terms and imagine that things like capitalism and socialism are opposite extremes that share no middle ground. For me the salient question is this. Will the world manage, like some of the examples at the end of the book, to turn away from this type of shock-based free market exploitation, or will new ways of implementing it ruin the hope for billions of average people around the world?
Book Review: Shameful misrepresentation of Friedman
Summary: 3 Stars
If you must read this as I unfortunately did (audio download), please, please, read some Friedman too, or at the very least a synopsis of his works and ideas. He and his ideas are most grossly misrepresented by Klein. Yes, Friedman consulted for Pinochet's economic ministers briefly and gave them some ideas on how to liberalize markets (to try to fight the hyperinflation started by Pinochet), but he was not in any way complicit with Pinochet's repressive techniques! On the contrary, Friedman saw the implementation in Chile of his recommendations as a means for undermining Pinochet's tyrannical regime! Klein's inference that Friedman's ideas and Pinochet's despotic actions and policies in Chile were even remotely compatible or synthesized in parallel are laughable, and some simple fact-checking and a look into the chronology of events will quickly show the sloppy and shameful liberties she has taken.
I have given 3 stars only because I completely agree with the concept that people and parties take advantage of crises (in the name of self interest, or to further the greater good, or for a whole spectrum of reasons in between). Obviously crises present wonderful opportunities to fix broken systems in the hope of preventing such future crises. Witness the probable and imminent worldwide reforms to financial systems in response to last autumn's financial crisis. But to suggest that greedy corporatists are slowly changing the world in their favor, one crisis at a time, insults even one's most basic abilities to observe and analyze. The economy and it's infinite mechanisms and machinations are undergoing a great restructuring and reordering. Yes, there will certainly be some who take an immoral advantage of this situation, and unfortunately this will also include tendencies to try to increase government and bureaucratic control over the economy, but the net result will be an overall moral improvement over the previous shortcomings.