A closely argued study of the merits and demerits of free market economics in action.
The history of the economic shock that accompanied the right-wing military coup in Chile in 1973.
In 1955, the U.S. State Department launched a project in which Chilean economists were trained in the free market fundamentalism of Milton Friedman. When Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government of Salvador Allende, “the first Marxist politician to be freely elected as a head of state in any country,” the “Chicago Boys,” as they were called, went to work undoing Allende’s socialist reforms and installing policies that included the privatization of social security, the use of school vouchers, and the abolition of thousands of regulations. As Edwards, a professor of economics and former chief economist for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank, writes, the economists “would soon find out how different pontificating from the ivory tower was from actually implementing policies aimed at changing decades of entrenched policies.” Still, Chile eventually found its footing as a bastion of neoliberalism, and in the early 2000s, “Chile became, by a wide margin, the wealthiest nation in Latin America.” The nation was also marked by predatory capitalism and shocking inequality, a situation that was just fine by Friedman but was anathema to the working people of Chile—and was “a serious weakness that was mostly ignored by the architects of the model and that would come to haunt them.” Additionally, given that neoliberalism is globalist, Chile was long hampered in international trade by its status as a pariah nation thanks to the very military dictatorship that had brought the Chicago Boys to the fore. For all its successes, neoliberal Chile came to suffer from the failure of privatized social security. With the election of the leftist activist Gabriel Boric to the presidency in 2021, Chile is now abandoning many Chicago tenets in order to “move away from markets and competition.” Throughout, Edwards maintains a detailed yet accessible narrative.
A closely argued study of the merits and demerits of free market economics in action.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9780691208626
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
