Economics links
A lovely, clear rendition of the theory of the firm: Now, the manager does buy this equipment on the market, and pays real prices. But he doesn't sell the computer time to the staff. He gives it away. Is it worth it, in terms of somehow increasing profits or raising the company's share values? The boss has to guess. Many different bosses, in many
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Taking Stiglitz's review, his portrayal of Milton Friedman's economics is disgracefully false. And starting with There are no accidents in the world as seen by Naomi Klein is not encouraging that Klein isn't selling a conspiratorial mindset.
Alexander Cockburn is a commentator I have never had any time for, being very good at getting things wrong. He says The Chicago Boys laid waste the southern cone of Latin America in the name of unfettered private enterprise, when Chile has now the strongest and most stable economy in Latin America while Argentina would do rather better if the country could kick the Peronista habit of cutting up the pie before it has been fully baked.
That being said, kicking the IMF is always fun. Milton Friedman always enjoyed it, calling for its abolition and labelling its policies "welfare for Wall St": still the best summary of its particular pathologies.
John Gray has managed to be on every side of the major issues of the last 30 years: the one consistency is never giving anyone he is currently disagreeing with the benefit of the doubt. He writes Part of the power of this book comes from the parallels she observes in seemingly unrelated developments. In a fascinating and alarming examination of the underside of recent history, she notes the affinities between the policies of shock therapy imposed in the course of neo-liberal market reform and the techniques of torture that have been routinely used by the US in the course of the "war on terror". A perspective at once paranoic and conspiratorial: indeed, plain loopy, as if the word "shock" has some magical linking ability. And if John Gray thinks the US is facing defeat in Iraq, he hasn't been paying attention.
Reviews which I can pick to pieces without reading the book are not persuasive.
Countries are more likely to change policy regimes in response to crisis. Yes, we knew that. Sometimes they choose well, sometimes badly. The outcome in the post-Soviet bloc countries has been widely divergent, but those who adopted more broadly based market policies have done better than those which have not.
(Russia had some very particular problems which Geoffrey Sachs's -- not a discipline of Milton and not a Chicago Boy -- Shock Therapy did not deal with, partly because the head of the Central Bank at the time was doing his best to sabotage it.)
Sorry, your cited reviews make me even less interested in reading Klein's screed.
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