uncorrected proof

I'm largely convinced by this book, though it does feel a bit thin overall, and more than once I found myself shying away from the alarmism that seems to run beneath it. Still, Klein has an awful lot of believable facts on her side; enough to paint the picture of a powerful group of people only too happy to pounce on any crisis for financial and ideological gain. She certainly makes short work of Milton Friedman himself, and doesn't leave much wiggle room for his neocon disciples. She covers a lot of ground relatively quickly, however, and in doing so she doesn't always manage to support her arguments. Once or twice too often, she allows it to rest on circumstance and innuendo. She may be accurate in her assessment, or she may not. And the book is certainly a compelling read. But one suspects that a bit more thoroughness might have yielded more tempered—if less provocative—conclusions. Overall, though, as I began by saying, I buy a lot of what she's selling. I hadn't expected to find much more reason to be cynical about the neocon agenda, but how wrong I was. That said, her concluding chapter is genuinely uplifting, and gives you plenty of reason for hope if you're not uninterested in such things. ( )

This made my stomach hurt. I knew bits and pieces of this but having it all laid out like this is tough. I'm pretty against capitalism at this point, but this really paints a picture as to why. ( )

I should have read ‘The Shock Doctrine’ at least five years ago and regret that I did not. My main reason for the delay is having read so many articles about and references to it that reading the book itself seemed hardly necessary. That was the wrong attitude, as it is an excellent, thorough, case study-based description and critique of neoliberal economics in action across the world. Indeed, it is such an effective condemnation of neoliberal ideology that it gave me anger-insomnia. Klein’s great strength is analysis of case studies, building a wider narrative with nation-specific elements. Her central thesis, that catastrophic events are seized upon by neoliberal institutions to push unpopular and disastrous economic transformation, is highly convincing.

Insights that I found particularly notable included market doctrine enforcing itself:

Of all the constraints on the new government [of South Africa], it was the market that proved the most confining - and this, in a way, is the genius of unfettered capitalism: it’s self-enforcing. Once countries have opened themselves to the global market’s temperamental moods, any departure from Chicago School orthodoxy is instantly punished by traders in New York and London who bet against the offending country’s currency, causing a deeper crisis and the need for more loans, with more conditions attached.

The fact that corruption is part and parcel of this model of capitalism:

Corruption has been as much a fixture on this contemporary frontiers as it was during colonial gold rushes. Since the most significant privatisation deals are always signed amid the tumult of an economic or political crisis, clear laws and effective regulators are never in place - the atmosphere is chaotic, the prices prices are flexible and so are the politicians. What we have been living with with for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.

One of many depressing aspects of reading this book in 2015 is the indictment of IMF loans tied to structural adjustment, which have been applied once more in recent years, comprehensively wrecking Greece in the process. Moreover, the Bretton Woods institutions have apparently also got the EU enforcing their destructive and divisive agenda. As Klein points out, the originators of the IMF (Keynes in particular) must be turning in their graves. The fund was designed to bail out countries in economic crisis, not to identify economic crises, encourage deterioration through manipulation or inaction, then refuse funds unless the country implements policies that will worsen the situation. Chapter 12 quotes a World Bank chief economist talking about ‘seemingly beneficial deep crises’ and ‘taking advantage of the emergency atmosphere’. Rather than solving crises, the IMF and World Bank seek to use them. It happened in South America, it happened in Asia, and now it’s happening in Europe. I can also see echoes of the shock doctrine in the UK government’s austerity agenda, which was adopted with no political mandate in 2010. Inflammatory nonsense about the country being bankrupted by overspending in the public sector was used to justify an assault on the welfare state, worsening inequality and suffering amongst the most vulnerable.

Klein also argues that disasters themselves are now a major business, accompanied by vested interests and a horrible interdependence with rising inequality:

Already wealth provides an escape hatch from most disasters - it buys early-warning systems for tsunami-prone regions and stockpiles of Tamiflu for the next outbreak. [...] If we continue in this direction, the images of people stranded on New Orleans rooftops will not only be a glimpse of America’s unresolved past of racial inequality but will also foreshadow a collective future of disaster apartheid in which survival is determined by who can afford to pay for escape.

This, of course, leads to one of the most powerful, yet most difficult to tackle arguments for why humanity is failing to deal with climate change:

Perhaps part of the reason why so many of our elites, both political and corporate, are so sanguine about climate change is that they are confident they will be able to buy their way out of the worst of it.

Of the anger I felt whilst reading this book, a major part was directed at the mind-blowing intellectual arrogance of the Chicago School and its adherents. From my first introduction to the free market economic theory at the age of 16, it seemed evident to me that it was intellectually lazy. Chicago school economists may claim that their discipline has a scientific superiority because they use a lot of numbers, but their claims to emulate the hard sciences are utterly hollow. On the empirical front, evidence is chosen to support theories rather than vice versa. Breath-taking generalisations are made on the basis of small-scale experiments, because of course twenty undergraduate students filling in a questionnaire are functionally identical to seven billion heterogenous humans in a myriad of contexts. (See any behavioural economics book for such absurd extrapolations - [b:The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone--Especially Ourselves|13426114|The Honest Truth About Dishonesty How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves|Dan Ariely|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1331070373s/13426114.jpg|18912407] for example.) Moreover, copious and long-standing evidence that rational actor theory is useless and free markets do not exist is simply brushed aside.

Meanwhile on the theoretical front, it absolutely enrages me that free market economists are treated as intellectual titans. Their theories purport to explain human behaviour by ignoring everything that is most complex and difficult to understand about it! Empathy, co-operation, learning, memory, and cultural variation, for example, all have enormous implications for resource allocation, yet economics lumps them into a single error term. Or worse, treats them as wholly irrelevant. This is not some scientific, technologically advanced manner of analysing economies and societies. It is a self-interested confidence trick based in political ideology. Ironically enough, theoreticians of neoliberal economics are willing to ascribe self-interested behaviour to everyone except themselves. When accused of ideological bias, they defend their own interest as purely intellectual! Economists should be ashamed of the weak body of theory they reproduce without critical thought. The 19th century classical economists would have no truck with such evidence-blind overconfidence and arrogance. The theory of free market economics contains such idiotic contradictions! For instance, that freer markets with less government intervention are more competitive. In fact, such markets become dominated by monopolies and oligopolies, which benefit the companies with market power at the expense of the consumer. It is government intervention that allows markets to exist and keeps them from sliding towards monopoly. This has been evident ever since industrialisation and is only becoming more obvious in a world of global supply chains. The whole idea of markets achieving equilibrium is flawed, as it ignores all temporal or spatial variation. It’s as if a historian took a single photo of a landmark today and from just that basis extrapolated the history of the city in which it stands.

I could go on. (As you can probably imagine, I was joy to teach economics to.) That whole rant was inspired by Klein’s book but is not meant to imply that it’s incomplete. Other books can and should be written tearing the theories used to justify disaster capitalism into tiny pieces. In fact, I think Klein is right to focus on the practical results and implications of neoliberal doctrine, as it has proved remarkably impervious to theoretical and empirical critiques. As a set of theories and policy prescriptions, it has become so entirely institutionalised that universities, governments, politicians, and companies have forgotten that any other economics exists. Power and wealth have become so concentrated in the hands of those who justify themselves with this ideology that the ideology itself is almost moot - it can be enforced with economic and physical violence, so hardly needs to convince. The hypocrisy of those who nonetheless clothe themselves in intellectual rationalisations enrages me. Probably because I am in the very privileged position of being within this academic milieu, rather than a victim of disaster capitalism. As Klein makes clear, those victims have little time or space in which to grasp what is happening before it's too late to prevent the damage. In academia, there is plenty of time to point out the massive flaws in neoliberal theory and the vast problems the doctrine causes in practise. Unfortunately, nobody in power wishes to listen. ( )

This book made me extremely angry, at multiple times I had to stop reading to calm myself down. I hate people now ( )