Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #141 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-24
• Released on: 2008-06-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 720 pages

Amazon.com
Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine advances a truly unnerving argument: historically, while people were reeling from natural disasters, wars and economic upheavals, savvy politicians and industry leaders nefariously implemented policies that would never have passed during less muddled times. As Klein demonstrates, this reprehensible game of bait-and-switch isn't just some relic from the bad old days. It's alive and well in contemporary society, and coming soon to a disaster area near you.

"At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq'' civil war, a new law is unveiled that will allow Shell and BP to claim the country's vast oil reserves… Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly outsources the running of the 'War on Terror' to Halliburton and Blackwater… After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts… New Orleans residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be re-opened." Klein not only kicks butt, she names names, notably economist Milton Friedman and his radical Chicago School of the 1950s and 60s which she notes "produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today." Stand up and take a bow, Donald Rumsfeld.

There's little doubt Klein's book--which arrived to enormous attention and fanfare thanks to her previous missive, the best-selling No Logo, will stir the ire of the right and corporate America. It's also true that Klein's assertions are coherent, comprehensively researched and footnoted, and she makes a very credible case. Even if the world isn't going to hell in a hand-basket just yet, it's nice to know a sharp customer like Klein is bearing witness to the backroom machinations of government and industry in times of turmoil. --Kim Hughes

From Publishers Weekly
The neo-liberal economic policies—privatization, free trade, slashed social spending—that the Chicago School and the economist Milton Friedman have foisted on the world are catastrophic in two senses, argues this vigorous polemic. Because their results are disastrous—depressions, mass poverty, private corporations looting public wealth, by the author's accounting—their means must be cataclysmic, dependent on political upheavals and natural disasters as coercive pretexts for free-market reforms the public would normally reject. Journalist Klein (No Logo) chronicles decades of such disasters, including the Chicago School makeovers launched by South American coups; the corrupt sale of Russia's state economy to oligarchs following the collapse of the Soviet Union; the privatization of New Orleans's public schools after Katrina; and the seizure of wrecked fishing villages by resort developers after the Asian tsunami. Klein's economic and political analyses are not always meticulous. Likening free-market shock therapies to electroshock torture, she conflates every misdeed of right-wing dictatorships with their economic programs and paints a too simplistic picture of the Iraq conflict as a struggle over American-imposed neo-liberalism. Still, much of her critique hits home, as she demonstrates how free-market ideologues welcome, and provoke, the collapse of other people's economies. The result is a powerful populist indictment of economic orthodoxy. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Naomi Klein offers an antidote to those who herald globalization as the great equalizer of nations. The author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Klein links disparate events throughout the 20th and 21st centuries—the collapse of the Soviet Union, the atrocities in Chile under Pinochet, the post-tsunami crises in Sri Lanka, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the invasion of Iraq—to reveal the two-faced nature of capitalism. Critics agreed that the book—accessible and impeccably researched—is an important contribution to the debate over globalization. Some were less taken with Klein’s thesis, however. The Washington Post noted that Klein sees too many conspiracies instead of "the all-too-human pattern of chaos and confusion, good intentions and greed, playing out in the wake of catastrophes." Yet even Shashi Tharoor, a former UN Under-Secretary General, admitted Klein’s great usefulness in helping us understand "the shape and direction of our current Age of Uncertainty."
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Not one single fact in the entire text
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
Great information and told in a way that can really penetrate. A wake up call!

Conclusions not based on adequate evidence
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.