Truly remarkable precisely because it couches the problem of late stage capitalism in our concrete reality, it briefly, eloquently poses the exactly cTruly remarkable precisely because it couches the problem of late stage capitalism in our concrete reality, it briefly, eloquently poses the exactly correct questions we should all be asking every day -- and realizing that we have all been fooled. That we are continually being fooled.
Here's the rub: We weren't always in this deep. There are still living people who remember the protections against runaway capitalism and the reality of a better way of doing things.
There was a massive push by capitalism, itself, to re-frame and re-contextualize the very concept of the profit motive, how people work, even the idea that good works could be offloaded as donations to non-profit mega-corps rather than the thing itself. (Look at carbon credit programs which have all almost entirely turned out to be fraud-schemes.)
And more importantly, look at what kinds of problems that capitalism can NEVER solve: the medical field, mental health, bureaucracy itself, or the circular self-serving nature of a monolithic money machine that cycles through the endless stages of control, from putting leashes on politicians, creating laws to benefit their profit margins, steamrolling popular opposition, controlling all narratives, and successfully silencing or exhausting the grand majority of the entire population -- making us all accept the fact of our Learned Defeatism.
The fact that practically all of us genuinely hate this entire system, sees how it is destroying us, and how we all wish it could just go away is really rather funny.
But it IS the core narrative. Capitalism is designed to have everyone hate it IF ONLY TO OFFER UP A PLEASING PRODUCT MADE BY CAPITALISM TO FIX THE PROBLEM THAT IT, ITSELF, CREATED.
See the trap?
None of us will get out of this without understanding that there are no quick-fixes, no products we can buy, and we can't even trust our near-universal cry of: "Oh, there's nothing that I (singular, just me,) can do." That line has also been programmed into us by the same people who make 500+ times our take home salaries. Honestly... should we trust their narrative?
This book is pretty amazing. It is smart, short, and drives each point home in a way that old masterworks on economic theory rather fail to do. This, at least, holds up an unclouded mirror.
While definitely not laugh-out-loud like the great movie, this original non-fiction about the housing bond bust of '08 certainly makes up for it with While definitely not laugh-out-loud like the great movie, this original non-fiction about the housing bond bust of '08 certainly makes up for it with lots of extra detail and explanation.
I'll just put this out there: nobody needs extra drama or characterization when the core, unbelievable immensity of assholery in the Stocks and Bonds market is enough to get millions of people boiling with rage.
That is, if they understand what happened, why it happened, and why it was never resolved. Why it's STILL an ongoing problem that just gets bigger and bigger with every passing year. Why it is very likely the very reason why housing prices have done nothing but rise and lock several generations out of ever owning a home now.
Is it a complicated issue? Not really. It's just clothed in stupid, obscuring language. Should it have landed a ton of people behind bars instead of getting golden parachutes? Absolutely. Should the market have corrected itself when it was merely bad instead of catastrophic? Absolutely.
And yet, this tale of the few shorters betting against the fraudulent housing market only got rich. In a sane society, the whole house of cards should have collapsed and been replaced with real regulations and watchdogs. Instead, we collectively just kicked the can.
Is this related to our current massive inflation cycle?
Yes, it does cover a lot of the same ground we're being smothered with -- the ongoing ecological disaster, the entQuite simply: A very important book.
Yes, it does cover a lot of the same ground we're being smothered with -- the ongoing ecological disaster, the entrenchment of heartless capitalism, the seemingly insurmountable problem of mobilization when we're fighting with our own zeitgeist and fatalism -- but this nonfiction work has a one fantastic thing going for it.
It's extremely well-written and engaging. Deeply researched, polarizing, and fact-based. And when I say polarizing, I mean polarizing in the way we can choose either life... or death. This book is years old by now and new facts have only made our current situation even more damning, but the core is still as valid as ever.
There are still a lot of people hell-bent on trying to raid the treasure of the earth at the expense of destroying everything in their path. The profit motive is absolutely to blame. Regular people are stuck with no good choices, no valid alternatives, and everyone else is getting poisoned by fracking. And when I mean everyone, I mean all life.
We can't simplify this problem without ignoring the system that every part relies upon, and the system itself is failing at a faster rate than ever. It's not enough to see a tweet here or there or discover yet another massive abuse of power, trust, or might-makes-right, be it oil companies, globalization, dwindling resources, or capital itself.
This book does a fine job walking us down a great, wide path of our very much worsened problem. There is hope, too, but most of it boils down to ALL of us getting our act together, mobilizing the rest of humanity to just say NO to the looters, before we can make real change.
Mass movements DO make a big difference. Organization makes BETTER difference. We all need to work together. Post haste. Or do we want to discover a dead ocean next? How about the rest of our power failing with temperatures up to 56 C everywhere? Or how about the plain simple fact of poisoned water... everywhere.
We're looking at mass death. Either we get off the pot or we're gonna get flushed with the rest of the shit.
So. Yeah. It's a polarizing book. Do we want to live or die?...more
Oh my, this was a super easy and fun read for me. It has that perfect oddball mix of technothriller present day SF, savvy forensic economics white-hatOh my, this was a super easy and fun read for me. It has that perfect oddball mix of technothriller present day SF, savvy forensic economics white-hat heroism, and an easily humorous late-middle-age protag that is cunning, and careful, and wily.
Plus, it's Cory Doctorow. There are a great number of fun references to oddballs everywhere, not to mention a great understanding of cryptocurrencies, cryptography, and hacking in general.
Of course, this is a major life-hacking novel, almost noir, and definitely a hoot of an adventure.
I would LOVE to read a TON of Martin Hench novels. Hell, I tend to LOVE any novel with a good understanding of economics and financial chicanery and the will to right injustices.
I mean... is there a more timely novel out there? Just look around. Wouldn't we love to see some light shine on those sinister tax havens and Lex Lutherish super-rich and the stock markets? Wouldn't we love to have some kind of superman rip some of these evil-doers from their bunkers?
Yeeessssss, please.
So give me more of this. Give me the really smart stuff. Hit me. :) ...more
While the idea doesn't exactly feature all throughout this piece of good advice, it does underscore the obvious idiocies and point to a classy, simple solution. Kinda like the causes for the Revolution.
So, what, we need to overthrow the stock market? Um.. no. The actual idea is pretty damn simple and backed up with massive proof in the massive pudding.
*Buy* *Hold*
It outperforms almost everything. Second-guessing, day trading, money managers, almost everything else performs worse. It's pretty simple. Don't pay for middlemen, diversify for yourself, and have it rock out with compound interest.
Unfortunately, the rest of the book is just a lot of repeating the same good idea, always pushing for the value of ETFs, and it highlights how the system OUGHT to work, without interference or bad actors. All good, as far as that goes. So, if we live in a perfect world, this is just about perfect. And maybe it'll work fine for most, even so, but the point is to get going EARLY so the compound works FOR you.
Honestly, the book could have been even shorter but what is here is still good. I've seen most of these ideas many times before, even so. ...more
After more than half a lifetime of being told that Adam Smith was one hell of a brilliant man and he should be a must-read for anyone wanting to underAfter more than half a lifetime of being told that Adam Smith was one hell of a brilliant man and he should be a must-read for anyone wanting to understand what capitalism really means, I FINALLY went ahead and READ Wealth of Nations.
Okay. So I'm a bit late for the party. I've read the Kensians and I've read tons of books on how the Chicago school really f**ked up so many developing nations and I've been a student of the stock market, global economy, and how it directly ties to history. It's a hobby. I learn a lot.
So, was Adam Smith this horribly dry Englishman from the time of the American Revolution that liked to drone on about business?
Hell, no. Or rather, he was a contemporary and he was a student of business and trends and markets, but he was also a very good writer, continually interesting, conversational, and frankly brilliant in the way that a great mentor or teacher ought to be.
And it is brilliant. No doubts about it. But let's keep it real. This is about the Invisible Hand of the marketplace. He illustrates how neither workers nor employers can dictate economic conditions. Putting one's finger on the conditions can lead to serious imbalances and overcorrections.
Of course, he was illustrating these ideas hundreds of years ago and since that time there have been thousands of people attempting to argue or disprove the premise or at least to game the system in such a way that they can pretend to be economic magicians.
But the fact is this: without outside shenanigans, coercion, or fraud, Adam Smith's observations are still as valid now as they were back then.
My favorite takeaway: the Scottish banks and how they began lending out more money than what they had on hand because people were gaming the exchange rates of gold in other countries, and how gold prices, even though they OUGHT to have been stable as a guide of value, suddenly proved to be quite unreliable. And that's not even bringing up the mines and new gold.
This has been an ongoing issue in modern economics, the question of fiat versus gold standard. And it also discusses the fundamentals of fractional reserve and debt-based liquidity. Not in great detail, mind you, but the successes of stocks, freer investments, and trust really underlined the spirit of the markets and even more for the system we have today.
Not surprising, I know. For all the people who keep quoting him and all the people who have probably never read him, he's bandied about as the father of economics. Interestingly enough, now that I've read it, I note that there are a lot MORE people who read into him a lot of heavier conclusions than he would have made, himself.
He was the first to admit that trying to strangulate the market by trusts and coalitions of market makers always tend to create massive upheavals, poverty, and violence. Let me restate that: people who try to game the system in big ways are the very ones who cause the whole system to go belly up.
Profit is natural. So is loss. When systems are created to limit one and enhance the other, it capitalizes and consolidates the inequality. When the Invisible Hand comes, it comes down hard.
That's a natural correction, folks.
This isn't a question of Marxism or Capitalism. Indeed, this is older than either. It's just a natural observation of economics and people.
This review is not a comprehensive review, mind you. I was pretty much enthralled by the read. I learned a lot even if it just overlapped with all my previous studies. But best of all, I think it's a fantastically good and easy read. It's good enough that I don't want a break. I'm moving right on to another of Adam Smith's books right away.
When it comes to sussing out the state of our world and all the factors that contribute to where we've wound up, I'm not a slouch. I've read hundreds When it comes to sussing out the state of our world and all the factors that contribute to where we've wound up, I'm not a slouch. I've read hundreds of books and have followed so much news and have discovered, again and again, that Noam Chomsky *Knows His Shit*.
Just from the standpoint that he has also been one of those intellectuals with a fantastic memory, unimpeachable logic, and a burning heart, I should mention that he should be read just because he cares.
The title of this book is pretty inflammatory, no? But my advice is this: read it for the information within. I've read a lot of books that back up each of these concise points in vast detail.
So why should anyone read THIS particular book, though?
Because it's diamond-sharp, doesn't waste a single second of time getting to the point, and it IS based on facts. It should come as no surprise that almost everyone is getting disenfranchised while the rich and powerful are getting more rich and powerful by the second. If you want to get that breakdown in a very short period of time, you would do much worse than to consider this a brilliant primer.
Get your foot in the door.
It's not like the world is getting better. Don't fall for PR or pyrrhic victories. The causes of our problems are still here. We need to understand the problems before we can cure them, and no amount of palliative care is worth the time....more
You know, the first time I saw the title and the cover, I thought this would be a far-future SF, not a near-future prediction. I'm happy to be wrong.
IYou know, the first time I saw the title and the cover, I thought this would be a far-future SF, not a near-future prediction. I'm happy to be wrong.
I'm even happier to have loved this novel from the first page to the last. Indeed, over the last 8 years of new novels, I've loved everything that KSR has written, being duly impressed about his improvement with characters and his truly fantastic grasp of science, politics, history, economics, and future speculation. Indeed, my only complaints have ever been about his characters who usually feel a bit more like vehicles for stories and especially IDEAS more than people, but for this book, it wasn't the case.
I was brought to tears several times.
However, I need to be very clear on this: KSR's strength is absolutely and utterly in ideas. I feel like I just read an accessible novel that outlines all of the biggest real-thought on climate change and possible solutions while having it all put through the meat-grinder of real-politics, real-people, and enormous ongoing tragedies.
The book starts out with millions dying of heat in India.
It picks up with angry people worldwide demanding change and butting heads, devolving into assassinations, new politics, massive setbacks, economic upheavals, MORE climate disasters hitting the affluent people, more chaos, new legislation, MORE political upheaval, more dead, and economic systems that are both familiar and much more complicated than most of us have ever really researched TODAY.
I mean, some of us have. Bitchains, UBIs, carbon monetary systems (not as in burning it, but drawing it out of the atmosphere), and the eventual re-greening of the Earth. And it's a lot more complicated and gloriously explored than anything I can get into with a simple review, but the BOOK does a fantastic job of outlining a gloriously chaotic near-future that would, in other times, be considered a bonafide classic.
The book, frankly, is rich, deserves immense respect, lots of thought, and public discourse.
Maybe most of us are burned out by the seeming impossibility of getting a New Green Deal, one where the new jobs come directly from creating a sustainable future.
But maybe what we really need are the ideas firmly planted in our heads, complete with plans, backup plans, backup-backup plans, and awareness of all the ways it could all go wrong (and will) so we're not blindsided when we lose four billion people (minimum) in the next 30 years.
This novel should be THAT talking point. For how tragic it is, it's FULL of great thought and, dare I say it, HOPE....more
Upon reading this, I must balance two reactions very carefully.
I agree with the basic premise that ON THE WHOLE, dire poverty across the world has reUpon reading this, I must balance two reactions very carefully.
I agree with the basic premise that ON THE WHOLE, dire poverty across the world has reduced and a lot of this has to do with the free exchange of goods MINUS the looters who exploit the system OR external negatives such as unrestrained pollution. We DO have a lot of reasons to remain optimistic. Technology, awareness, the willingness of governments to combat looting, and general innovation HAS forestalled some of the very worst predictions of history. The fact that we're still around and still driving cars and have cleaner air and waterways is proof of this.
I LIKE reading books that lay out all the points where we have not fulfilled all our most dire predictions. That we haven't achieved our worst dystopias.
However, despite this book devoting the last third of its pages to notes and bibliography, it does appear to suffer from a lot of rather telling biases and cherrypicking.
Yes, when the forces of good are doing good, we accomplish a lot. But when the forces of evil are bent on maintaining the harmful status quo and governments are consistently rolling back the kinds of protections that kept us safe from monopolies, polluters, economic slavery, and disaster economics, there's no way we can say that we can sit back and relax.
Indeed, the author does not say we shouldn't worry. But he DOES give us a lot of good, real data mixed in with some perhaps wildly misinterpreted data, all of which paints a very positive picture.
For one, we are on a trend to use fewer resources as a whole. We're not perfect, but we are innovating and consistently finding alternatives. The same is true for energy consumption. We are finding ways to do the same thing as before but more efficiently. Free market DOES help this trend nicely, assuming that other forces aren't interfering with it... like coalitions and monopolies that use strong-arm techniques to keep innovation down. But that's the purpose of regulation and politics, the same area that seems to be always under siege.
Even with my fairly large quibbles, I AM quite pleased to be reading books that illustrate the positive aspects of our world. It isn't all complete s**t. ...more
It's 2007 and Naomi Klein builds a rather convincing argument about modern governmental/corporational trends.
I've personally never seen it laid out soIt's 2007 and Naomi Klein builds a rather convincing argument about modern governmental/corporational trends.
I've personally never seen it laid out so baldly, but after having read several dozen of political books, perhaps an equivalent number of documentaries, and a lot of otherwise independent research into the topics herein, I'm willing to concede that she has a very valid point.
What is the point?
Modern economics theories are used to lay out a rather obvious plan of mass looting. They're constructed as laissez-faire Chicago School of Economics, which looks great on paper, letting the invisible hand of Adam Smith regulate all markets. In practice, putting it into effect, under the heading of Democracy or Liberation or whatever they want, the big heads of the Chicago school are backed with the CIA, big corporation interests, and a single additional theory that makes the whole thing gel together.
What's this extra theory? It's simple. They believe, as they have learned from their lessons in briefly earlier psychology research, that the best way to heal a patient is to first break their minds and bodies, starting them out on a tabula rasa, and then rebuilding from the rubble. So many have quoted the belief that the only way to get real change is after a disaster.
Never mind that the original torture victims in McGill college that underwent sensory deprivation, LSD, PCP, punctuated with ECT and blaring noise did not come out of the experience quite sane. Most of them never recovered. But THIS was the original study that they based their first great experiment on. Export the school of thought to Chile, and when it didn't quite take, destabilize the government, assassinate Allende, and install Pinochet. On Sept. 11, 1973. They used shock and awe, destroyed infrastructure, and people went hungry and were terrorized.
Guess who got a Nobel Prize in economics?
It's worse. The dictatorship was atrocious, but the big corporations were given leave to move in and rape the economy, loot anything of value, while allowing Pinochet to take the lion's share, turning him into an Oligarch, overnight. A decade later, Chile, once sporting one of the most impressive resumes of a growing and happy populace, could barely stand on its own. But the corporations got RICH.
Jump ahead to Russia right as Communism is going defunct. The same Chicago school economics of Free-Market offers them a deal. Businesses will loan expertise and open market doctrines and massive loans, but be sure to destabilize everything first. When enough blood is on the ground and people are terrified, starving, and giving up everything they ever owned, then offer them a deal they can't refuse. Capitalism on a plate that promises everything that the European nations and America has to offer since Communism is dead.
When democracy is offered but capitalism is competing, capitalism beats anything. Enter a capitalism-backed coup, corporate sponsorships everywhere, and a promise that our new leader will be able to make himself and a handful others into some of the top 30 ranked richest people in the world, opening up Russia to free trade on a scale never seen before, the only way to keep it going is by looting the population. And it did. What was the number? 14 million homeless children? Think about that. At least under communism there WAS something like a middle class. Now it's only the super rich and the survivors.
CLEARLY, this is an AMAZING outcome for the Chicago School! Companies got rich. The stock market had a field day supporting the victors. Everyone was shaking everyone else's hands. Except for the rest of the 99%, of course. They went hungry. A reported 50,000 AIDS victims exploded into 1.5 million over the space of a couple of years. Clearly, everyone was having a party.
But the rich got richer.
Remember what happened during the Iraq War, part 2? Privatized war, with every single aspect of the war delegated to private companies except for the troops, themselves. 90% of every contract went into overhead, contractors subcontracting up to four times until there was no longer any money left for doing the work. And easily, if you look back on the actual work for the reconstruction, either it was not completed in 85% of the cases, or what did get finished was at half capacity after a year. ALL work and workers were brought in from the outside. Corporations tried to set up McD and Walmart, unloaded big screen TVs on the streets that were lined with rubble.
Shock and Awe. Come on. The purpose is to drive them all into a permanent state of helplessness or create an environment of terrorism. Against them. But heck, as long as we can brew terrorists this way, each one wanting to get revenge or at the very least, JUSTICE for this travesty. 650,000 dead. For Oil. For the free market. For the freedom of a hoard of corporations to come swooping in and install a Free Trade Zone, where profits just kept coming.
Let's ignore for a moment that every cabinet member in the presidency at that time had vested and current interests in the very same corporations that made the most money on Iraq. Or that America inflated its debt many times over to pay for the graft, looting, and amazing incompetence, while leaving the door open to keep ALL of the contractors out of the legal crosshairs of ANY country, while walking away with astounding paychecks.
Ignore the fact that most invasions, if they're NOT there to loot, will actually set aside troops to protect national heritage. There is a lot of proof that the national museum holding artifacts thousands of years old was specifically excluded from that protection list, which is why troops sat by and watched as so many truckloads of priceless artifacts were spirited away. Later, even now, only 20% have ever been recovered.
We can add Hurricane Katrina to the list. The same contractors for Iraq came in to help out, taking more government money, pulling the same exact crap, and then leaving the job almost completely undone. We're talking BIG money, too. But look on the bright side! All that land can now be cleared out to build new condos! Tons of companies swooped in to reclaim the land. And they did. And a lot of them were linked, intricately, to the SAME people who were supposed to REBUILD for the original inhabitants.
Sorry, folks, couldn't do the job. You're gonna have to find a new place to live. My brother here wants the land for his new McD!
Yep, first you need to have a disaster. If you don't have a disaster, make one. If you can, build compounds and Green zones and make sure you give enough fodder to create a simmering cauldron of hate that you can regularly call on to rise up and smash down with your brand new war machine. And make sure it keeps on simmering, too, right, ISIS? We need a reason to keep getting the latest equipment to protect our super-rich bunkers.
It's great economics as long as your real intention is to get extremely rich. It's not good economics if you want long-lasting, sustained prosperity. It's the looter's creed. Make situations you can profit from. Make sure you always negotiate from the ultimate position. If that means making sure the rest of the world has a foot on its neck, then that's all for the best. That's GOOD NEGOTIATION TACTICS.
Laissez-faire, to these guys, means taking away all the safety nets. They're the same ones gutting social security, social protections, and basic food and health for the poorest people in our first-world nations. They want no government, or to turn all governments into shells with no power to do anything. They've stated this creed a million times. They want social darwinism at its worst. Keep everyone so shock and awed that they can take everything. Absolutely everything.
Let's judge an idea not on its stated ideal. Let's judge an idea based on its actual practice. If this wonderful ideal says it works best after a disaster, flawlessly re-establishing the free hand of the market, then by their own writings, we should have seen a flowering of cooperation, self-interest coinciding with everyone else's self-interest, and a natural growth of blanket prosperity that effects everyone involved. It's pretty. I've read many great books on the Chicago Style of Economics and loved them. But let's look at the ACTUAL FACTS of its implementation.
There has never been a free hand of the market. The big banana corporation pressured America to secure its economic freedom. America got it's most famous laissez-faire economists to embark on a campaign, assisted with a ton of money, integral CIA support, and a bunch of extra vultures hanging in the wings, smelling blood in the water. When the blood splashed and buildings with the elected government were murdered, all the looters moved in. Of course, back in the day, it was all ideological garbage. Sticking it to the communists, bringing in democracy. Ignore the fact that they just bombed a democracy and Pinochet the dictator came in, got rich, and entered a very profitable loot cycle with the outside vultures.
It begs the question. If, each and every time, they bring in the Chicago School of Economics, they always bring the same result, then maybe we ought to question their motives. Maybe.
I'm just waiting for other enemies of this paradigm to get their own shock and awe. Left-leaning college campuses? Gay bars? All they need is a disaster. They can wait for it and exploit it like with Katrina, but they're perfectly willing to orchestrate them, too. And give you wonderfully idealistic reasons why you should let them murder you, too.
Dark, right? But real. You've seen these looters in the housing bubble. The banking crisis. It's big. Very, very big. You can complain about transgenders in bathrooms all you like, but the really scary bits are right here. And they can take us all down. Equally....more
Not surprised, mind you. But I am utterly astounded. It feels like there are no books written any more that rely on real invesI am utterly astounded.
Not surprised, mind you. But I am utterly astounded. It feels like there are no books written any more that rely on real investigative journalism.
But this is one, and it has meticulous, astounding scope.
It's one thing to point out the flaws in your opposition. Those kinds of books are commonplace and are always designed to sway you persuasively. And then there are books that give you a very, very big picture that shows you something so scary, so pervasive, that it boggles the imagination and is worse than any horror novel ever written.
This is about the Koch brothers. Two men in the 6th and 7th richest place in the world, who built an empire on oil money with the very worst record for ecological disasters, where ends always justify the means, turned all their money toward politics. How did they do this? Philanthropy. As in, pouring all their money into foundations and trusts that then poured all their money into other foundations and trusts in such a horribly convoluted shell-game that it takes full-time researchers to uncover where the money originated.
Why did they do this? To bypass political financing regulations.
Where did these foundations and trusts lead to?
Educational institutions in order to promote radical right wing agendas in all the biggest schools, tempting all students with ongoing stipends and opportunities as long as they tow the line.
Astroturfing. Creating hundreds of seemingly grass-roots organizations like the Tea Party and many like it, like the Heritage Foundation, etc., to provide ideological foot-troops against any target they pleased.
Fundraising campaigns that stagger the imagination, still using the shell-game premise, that led to nearly 300 billion dollars just to capture all the seats in congress and the senate. And the presidency. They used every trick in the book. Smear campaigns in advertising was only a small part of it. They bought and paid for several networks, tons of writers, and spread their right-wing agenda across so many fronts that it APPEARED to be THE only game in town. They even eventually strong-armed the Republican Campaign into giving over the reigns.
It started with the Koch brothers and their ideological obsession. Now it's a full network of the richest banding together to create what, in the parlance, can only be an Oligarchy. Rule by the rich.
What is the bottom line? The rich get richer. No one else matters.
Definitely not the middle class or the poor. If you're not in the upper 1%, you're nothing. They have bought the political system.
It is so much worse than you might imagine. They have lied through their teeth on practically anything and everything. They have done everything they can do to dismantle the EPA, health care systems, anti-trust laws, inheritance laws (That ONLY affect the upper 1%), brainwashing the intellectual elite (or at least giving them all monetary incentive to tow the line even if they don't BELIEVE), fund every group that nay-says global warming, blames every victim for the housing crisis, and, of course, the Obamacare act.
None of this is about the reality any of us regular people believe in. They say whatever they want in order to accomplish only ONE thing: their bottom line. If that means dismantling all government, all checks and balances, and the possibility of ever having an egalitarian society ever again, then it JUST DOESN'T MATTER.
Almost everyone in the government has a major financial hand in the Koch pie. Local, State, Nationwide. The regulators have either worked for or still work with the worst abusers.
If it sounds like some mob-run scheme, then you're right.
The fact that normal people can't untangle the web, or if they've gotten far enough in the tangle, they throw up their hands and cry for mercy, is exactly the point.
People ARE untangling the web and this book is a fantastic example of it.
Am I scared of what I've learned? Oh hell yes. I was so scared back in the 2000's that I swore off political reading or watching tv ever again. If I couldn't trust anything I heard, then I would spend my time better by reading fiction.
I stopped being depressed and feeling helpless. And now that I feel a bit better, I decided to step back into the knowledge playground. I have strength I didn't have back then. This book doesn't make me spiral into desperation.
Rather, it makes me proud that there are still people willing to report the truth.
Maybe someday, this book will be required reading after we get over this crisis. Or perhaps it will be an underground book suppressed by the Oligarchy. Either way, we will have seen how we got here....more
Despite the hutzpah of a title like WHY NATIONS FAIL, there's nothing in the text itself that I found disagreeable, and I've read a lot of different eDespite the hutzpah of a title like WHY NATIONS FAIL, there's nothing in the text itself that I found disagreeable, and I've read a lot of different economic and political theories of wealth over the years.
Of course, there have been a lot of armchair historians and armchair economists and armchair politicians, so who knows if 20/20 vision is really accurate? They could all be riffing on one fundamental theory or another and making a messy conclusion. Right?
The beauty of this one is pretty simple in effect if not in the supporting particulars. Tons of examples are given from all kinds of nations and economic policies and politics all throughout history and including a very refreshing survey of modern nations. They first break down the prevailing bad theories that revolve around geography, culture, bad luck, or even the big modern one we see all the time: Ignorance. *laugh* You know, the one that says, "If only you had our experts, you too can have all the wealth we have."
The fundamental difference in this book, fascinatingly so, can be summed up quite easily. And it's kinda obvious, too.
Extractor policies and inclusive policies.
You can translate that into government/economic policies that loot in order to grow or those that give a share of all the profits and incentives to all the people working in the system. Vicious cycles and Happy cycles.
Dictators that keep on taking can keep it up for a long time and even if there are revolutions, the revolutions keep putting the same damn policy in place. Any kind of authoritarian government can work to that same tune. Short term growth, sharp declines.
The politics and the economics of it are perfectly entwined. You can't have one without the other.
On the other hand, there's the other side. If everyone, not just the elite, has a stake in the game, then everyone works harder and with more intelligence to accomplish whatever they have to accomplish.
Use guns, coercion, theft. Or use honest cooperation.
It's pretty obvious that BOTH can be a basis for any nation. As can a wide, wide continuum mixing both elements in any. And that's also the point. Any nation can succeed or fail. No nation is exempt.
But it still requires a rather huge change of heart and it must be truly enacted in both the economics side and the political side. One without the other will perpetuate the same looting cycle.
For fans of other authors and big theories that nail this same idea, look to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Or Game Theory.
You will have all types of individuals either working toward a collaborative whole or those who will short the whole damn thing down. The institutions with enough checks and balances DO seem to edge toward the more prosperous equations. Those who dismantle those checks and balances or work together to loot other subsets will take from the total potential benefits of wealth until it is all used up.
It's quite complicated in practice, of course, but for a cohesive underlying theory, it works a lot better than saying Communism! or Capitalism! or Socialism!
All those can be filled with thieves or genuinely cooperative individuals. The difference is in the institutions and economic models that might favor the thieves or the genuinely cooperative.
The real joy of reading this book is the myriads of examples. :)...more
Let's be real here. I didn't come to KSR's dinner table for a simple adventure story.
I always come to eat a novel so rich with ideas that I tent to fLet's be real here. I didn't come to KSR's dinner table for a simple adventure story.
I always come to eat a novel so rich with ideas that I tent to forget that there's a core story underneath all the cool bits of political revolution, economic warfare, the problem of representation, quantum intelligence, cultural identity, and of course... CHANGE.
But like a rice dish with WAY too many spices, the core story to this novel is somewhat overwhelmed by this plethora of great ideas.
Did I enjoy the characters represented? The popular-revolution pregnant-princess on the run with an American quantum physicist as they hop throughout the heart of China and the moon, angling toward a war of hearts, minds, and wallets?
Yeah. I did. :) But it was downright SUBTLE compared to the rich mess of other ideas popping all around me!
In this respect, it's quite on par with 2312. Less space-opera, more revolution, and very wonderfully full of Chinese. :)...more
This is a novel of great and towering ideas, indeed!
SF idea novels have a long and fantastic tradition in SF and I'll be honest: I love them all. It'sThis is a novel of great and towering ideas, indeed!
SF idea novels have a long and fantastic tradition in SF and I'll be honest: I love them all. It's a very specific and niche SF, but thank the heavens, Robinson made it big enough in people's estimations to be able to keep writing the fantastically deep stuff and let the world-building go wild.
Remember 2312? Remember the Mars trilogy? He dives deep into location and gives us a very broad view of a whole world or a whole time, drilling deep into how the society works while simultaneously having TON to say about ours.
Not only that, but in this novel, he manages to pull off something that I kinda feel like he always seems to have a bit of trouble with: the characters. There's even a solid economic plot here, threaded pretty expertly among really fascinating sub-plots all directly tied to this New York City of the future after all the waterlines have risen across the world.
The only time that this DOESN'T feel like a long love-letter to this NYC of the future that's not only breathing but fighting for it's life and culture like a character of its own, is with the extinction of subspecies subplot that takes us all over the place in a dirigible. With nuclear blasts that take out polar bears, floating balloon cities in Canada, or a naked butt over a treeline for an eager online audience. :)
Truly, this may not be a novel for everyone, but it *IS* a novel for all you lovers of the Idea Novel sub-genre, the kind of read that takes you to the heights and depths of an economic mystery and an engineered economic collapse.
Honestly, it actually feels like an updated and rather more comprehensive The Dervish House with the focus being on NYC rather than Hungary. But it it goes full-hog Economics-Punk and I laughed deliriously because I LOVE this kind of thing. It's about as far away as you can get from the regular old SF, treating you not only as someone smart, but someone willing to think for yourself and LIVE in this complicated world of Co-Op skyscrapers, derivatives experts, boat pilots, divers, and champions of law. :)
Above all, it's smart and dense and fascinating across the board.
Don't expect too much in the way of BIG plots other than the one, and settle in for a world-building ride with cool characters and one really, really big character that supercedes them all: NYC.
What a pleasant surprise! I expected a retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk but I didn't expect it to drill down this deep or have quite this much tradWhat a pleasant surprise! I expected a retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk but I didn't expect it to drill down this deep or have quite this much traditional Fantasy adventure including so many dragons and cows and amazingly powerful Corporate Giants getting involved in the whole sordid mess of losing an economic empire.
What?
Yeah! Economic empire and boardroom situations and fire-breathing battles!
Not to mention great wordplay and situational humor. I'll never forget the whole sequence of the Prince and the great artist Buck that depicted the great Kingdom's White House and the portrait of his father George Washington. :)
Seriously. There's a whole lot of Bull in this book. Literally. Or should I say that the golden calf and the religion it has spawned is a true delight? Or how much I love the fact that a Dragon can become a Cow. :)
Don't be a Jack! The corporate world is a real killer!
I was caught on the first page and even though the build-up in the novel was slightly slow for me, the situational humor in the Fantasy and the juxtaposition of the whole corporate world ideas kept me fully invested until the action took off and blew me away. :)
I chuckled quite consistently and the ending was extremely satisfying. :)
Even though I consider the author a friend, I need to reiterate that this is a truly unbiased review.
I'm going to have to make a new shelf for the growing number of economi-punk titles that have been coming out. I can't believe how many of them there I'm going to have to make a new shelf for the growing number of economi-punk titles that have been coming out. I can't believe how many of them there are, or why I get drawn so hard and fast into these kinds of tales. I can easily list one economist-protagonist for each of my fingers, and no one is more surprised than me that I'm digging it.
I'm digging it hard.
Can we have math geniuses make great heroes? Why yes, of course you can. SF has a very long history of doing just that. But how about Fantasy? Why yes, yes, indeed, it looks like crossovers are happening all over the place, and everyone is heartily enriched by the trend.
Take this novel, which grabbed me from the get go and didn't let go throughout its fantastically dark and emotional passage. Our heroine is a savant, hand-picked and groomed to be an elite tool of an empire that has good aspects as well as being quite ruthlessly evil, bringing progress and some of the most repressive social regimes that even a southern baptist hate group might blanche at. And yet, the Masquerade brings schools and medicine and stability, uniting so many disparate cultures, while eventually homogenizing them all at the same time. Baru Cormorant vows to free her home from within the bowels of the beast with the tools of the same empire she wants to escape.
Great set-up. It's obviously a tragedy from go. The growth and setbacks, the challenges and the successes and the failures get tightly woven together until we truly believe we've got the real measure of Baru. I really like her. I like her even through to the end of the novel. I may not approve or condone anything that happens at all. That doesn't really matter. There is evil and there is good in everything and everyone. Even the most atrocious of social norms become background to the overriding immediacy of what everyone is going through at the moment.
I wanted everyone to succeed so badly that I could taste it. I was holding three or four impossible things in my head at the same time, and I rejoiced in the grand tale that it was spinning. Yes. It was a novel about betrayal. But who's betrayal, and how many times will it occur? The question goes so deep and is spread so wide across the plains of the story that I was left in mute wonder.
I LOVE THIS NOVEL. It is so well-crafted. It is disturbing and full of purpose. It is full of meaning.
It remained such a grand and epic tale of love and striving and hope, with perfectly executed waves of storytelling, that I never once wanted to put this book down. The undercurrent was deep and swift and oh so nasty. I felt almost like I was in one of the great Shakespearian tragedies. It held me by the neck and forced me to watch on as so much of humanity was sacrificed for ever-increasing tiers of need and hope.
Just. Wow.
Economics? Try the underpinnings and execution of a revolution, instead, because that was the core action of the novel. The theme, on the other hand, is one that will reverberate long after I've read the pages.
To think this was a debut novel. Amazing.
OF course, there are other very disturbing and important topics I probably should bring up. Homophobia is institutionalized in a rather grotesque fashion, among other vile things, but what I was most impressed about was the author's unflinching courage to lay it bare like he did.
Spoiler alert: (view spoiler)[Baru Cormorant's deepest secret and hope was all wrapped up in her desire for other women, and this, more than anything else the Masquerade repressed, was the core of her own rebellion. She has to fight for the success of the people who would repress her. This is a very dark, very painful kind of story to tell. Being a traitor is all wrapped up in this idea just as much as breaking free of the empire or creating the honeypot that betrays everything and everyone one last time. The twisting of this knife really killed me. (hide spoiler)]
This book has so many layers, but don't mistake me on this: it is one hell of a fantastic story on the surface, too. It was brilliant. :)...more
It's not for everyone, but I personally love financial sci-fi stories. Mr. Stross blew my mind with Accelerando, but the merchant novels were quite goIt's not for everyone, but I personally love financial sci-fi stories. Mr. Stross blew my mind with Accelerando, but the merchant novels were quite good as well, and one should never forget Rule 34. In fact, I've been enjoying a lot of financial chicanery novels over the last decade and a half. Like I said, it's not for everyone, but it is for the type of person who loves a good heist novel with huge-scale grifters and con-men.
Make no mistake, it's a heist novel, but it happens to be populated by post-humanity robots in an interstellar empire with insurance agents who are pirates, where faster-than-light promises are the best confidence scams, and extinct humanity is gestated in church-owned vats and revered before they're sent to die upon colony worlds as the nominal passed-on wish of humanity's deep past. It was certainly amusing we're referred to as "The Fragile" because we break so damn easily.
Not only were the ideas interesting, but the tale was very humorous at a distance. In reflection, I'm likely to giggle about this one. During the reading, it was a strange mixture of mendicant scholastics, financial mechanics, dancing skeletons, mermaids, and deep, deepwater squids harvesting rich uranium salts from an ocean world. In other words a fantastic ride....more
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