Product Description

The legendary financier-and founder of the Open Society Institute-offers crucial insight into the real meaning of freedom, and how societies can best promote it

After reflecting on his support of a losing Democrat for president, George Soros steps back to revisit his views on why George Bush's policies around the world fall short in the arenas most important to Soros: democracy, human rights and open society. As a survivor of the Holocaust and a life-long proponent of free expression, Soros understands the meaning of freedom. And yet his differences with George Bush, another proponent of freedom, are profound.

In this powerful essay Soros spells out his views and how they differ from the president's. He reflects on why the Democrats may have lost the high ground on these values issues and how they might reclaim it. As he has in his recent books, On Globalization and The Bubble of American Supremacy, Soros uses facts, anecdotes, personal experience and philosophy to illuminate a major topic in a way that both enlightens and inspires.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #598439 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-30
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 259 pages

Review
"It is hard to deny [Soros'] thorough familiarity with today's profoundly interdependent world." -- The St. Louis Post Dispatch

About the Author
George Soros heads Soros Fund Management and is the founder of a global network of foundations dedicated to supporting open societies. He is the author of several best-selling books including The Bubble of American Supremacy, Underwriting Democracy, and Open Society.

Customer Reviews

Open society, not anti-american
I had never heard of George Soros until I read an editorial he sent in to the Wall Street Journal. The editorial piqued my interest and so I looked him up and discovered this book.

The Age of Fallibility is very well written and presents very complicated theories in an easy to grasp from. Soros writes with the mentality of someone that really wants to get his point across: He tells you what he is going to talk about, talks about it, and then tells you what he just talked about. This has the affect of seeming a bit repetitive, but at the same time, you realize that the ideas are actually sinking in.

The first half of the book is dedicated to Soros' theory of reflexivity. Basically, reality isn't a fixed thing that we work around, it is constantly changing because of our actions and our thoughts. The idea of an open society is one that accepts that we will never reach a "perfect" solution to anything and so we must always work together to improve what we are doing, understanding that each improvement we make will require additional improvements.

The second half of the book is geared towards asking what is currently wrong with America, what is wrong with the world, and what we can do to fix it. Soros gives an in depth look into all three topics and makes some very good points.

To say that George Soros is anti-American is just silly. He merely points out the ways in which Americans can improve in our domestic and foreign policies. This is part of the open society model. There is always room for improvement. Pointing out that something can be improved is not the same as being against it.

The book got over my head a bit towards the end. I don't know enough about Russia to follow a lot of the points made there. Overall, this is a great book for someone who is interested in what is currently happening in this country and the world and would like to know more.

Soros is the Consummate Rationalist
People in other reviews have claimed "Soros hates Americans", however this is far from an accurate reflection of his beliefs. Soros *IS* the consummate rationalist. If U.S. policies that inflict massive harm on people around the world changed, he would revise his opinions. He is not irrational. He merely points out the harm the policies cause.

Soros theories on how thoughts are now being made to become reality are very novel in the space of social philosophers and very real today. Soros points out the fundamental issue, namely that people who wish to prevent future atrocities will need to counteract the way in which the thoughts of people are being used to create reality and facts.

Idolize Soros, or hate him because he doesn't support your political candidate ... either way, you will always learn something by listening to him and reading his books. Soros is very good at pointing out flaws in thinking. This has recently especially been the case with respect to the Iraq & Afghanistan military actions conducted by the U.S. It is a fact that these wars were imposed upon us by politicians financially backed by Texas-based oil monopolies and defense contractors. These are two major industrial groups facing complete marginalization and irrelevancy in the future in the absence of massive new orders for infantry weapons/supplies and new control of oil fields. These industries need each other, they needed the Iraq war, and they put a politician in the White House that gave it to us.

Soros is a rationalist and a realist. Soros will not dismiss a hard material observation for any reason and the result is that he routinely reminds us of thought methodologies that make it more difficult for politicians to use rhetoric such as "bombing cities for freedom" without also conjuring up the image of how many people are harmed, killed, and deprived of their freedom in the process of being bombed.

With geniuses like Gandhi, Roosevelt, Einstein, and Popper now passed away, Soros has emerged as one of the smartest still living people on the planet. Soros has made billions of dollars by simply predicting trade imbalances and trading on the side of them as they corrected. His theories, while not infallible, have a predictive and reliably accurate quality that is unsurpassed by the statements of any other living human being.

Soros teaches us to always ask questions.

Namely ... how "free" is the family cowering in their basement with their children awaiting death as their city is being bombed by "freedom fighters"?

It's a Worthwhile Education
Soros probably writes too many books and doesn't spend enough time crafting them. Certainly he stuffs each book with too many ideas and topics, some of them decidedly under-developed. For all that, the insights are well worth the slog.

If you've read his earlier books, in particular The Alchemy of Finance, you already know his philosophy and can quickly scan the first 70 pages of this book for new nuggets and then go on to his take on the current situation in America. Even if you're new to his blend of theory and practice, you may be better off skipping the passages that don't mean much to you. There's something useful for everybody here, so don't get bogged down, go ahead and piece together the good bits.

What particularly appealed to me is the application of his conceptual framework to the American political scene. The framework is about the two-way interaction between thinking and reality: We can't know what's going to happen, whether in markets, elections or wars. But our thoughts direct our behavior thereby shaping reality, which boomerangs back to our minds.

A simple example: people think [...] stock will rise so they buy it and it does and people think it will rise even more. Such is the stuff of market bubbles. Misconceptions become reality.

Soros applies this dynamic, arguing that Americans went along with Bush feel-good nostrums because they don't like to face unpleasant facts. Political reality was re-made in the same sense as demand for [...] causes a real bubble. Soros argues for a change in attitude.

The odds are probably against him. However, as he writes, one trades in order to win but one takes political positions because one believes in them. Now that's not really correct--plenty of people mouth political messages because they're paid to do so. But not Soros, more glory to him. All this is an overly simple sketch; read the book at least in part to get the flavor.