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 enlarge | Author: Naomi Klein
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy New: $8.88
You Save: $7.12 (44%)
New (63) Used (35) from $8.41
Rating:  340 reviews
Sales Rank: 237
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 720
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.4
ISBN: 0312427999
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.122
EAN: 9780312427993
ASIN: 0312427999
Publication Date: June 24, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Rubbish December 15, 2008
4 out of 14 found this review helpful
Hawt Garbage! She claims that Friedman supported the Iraq invasion when in fact he did not. She also claims that he supported the IMF's policies in Asia when in fact he doesn't even like the IMF. She claims that this is a "ground-breaking" new theory when it is actually just basic human psychology, when something isn't working you want to try something different/ The only thing Milton Friedman ever claimed to support was more liberty, something that the far-left never has come to understand.
 Required Reading December 15, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Let me start by saying that I am not in any way anti-capitalist. I work in the private sector, I have an MBA, and I believe that markets work. The Shock Doctrine is also not anti-capitalist, as many of the author's critics have claimed.
The Shock Doctrine is a groundbreaking and eye-opening account of the manner in which the brand of supposedly free-market capitalism we see today - manifested in the housing crisis and the current economic meltdown - has propagated throughout the world. It details extensively that - contrary to popular mythology - laissez-faire doctrine did not spread because it has triumphed fairly in the marketplace of ideas and demonstrated that it is good for the many. Rather, it has too often been imposed through stealth, extortion and exploitation, and more often than not, for the benefit of the few.
The result of this corporatism - in literally every case - has been widespread disenfranchisement, massive increases in poverty and unemployment, the destruction of shared wealth, and the tremendous enrichment of a very few. It is a legacy of shame, coercion and hypocrisy that provides a telling insight into the tension between developed and developing nations, and one with which every American who doesn't understand why the rest of the world doesn't love us unconditionally needs to become intimately familiar.
Awesome Read December 9, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Great Book. I loved it. Best thing I've read in a long time. A bit slow in the middle, but what a story!
If you've ever thought Republican economic theory was crazy evil wrong-headed nonsense here's 30 years worth of nefarious history to refute any right wing nutters you may be forced to deal with. Klein's book is a blistering refutation and indictment of right-wing neo-liberal economic theory.
Incredibly salient book in our current economically trying times. Klein's book provides history, context, an idealogical underpinning, and points the way to the culprits of our current mess. Let's keep our fingers crossed and pray all that despite some discouraging cabinet picks, Obama can finally bury the Friedmanite policies of the past 30 years which reached its most absurd and pure expression in this country during the Bush nightmare, and restore Keynesian economic polices and fiscal sanity to our poor long suffering country.
Absolutely essential reading December 9, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
There are very few books that actually fall into the "Must Read" category, but this is one of them. This is as powerful an indictment of the fallacies and real life errors of neoliberalism as has been published. Although the term "neoliberalism" is not widely known inside the United States, internationally it is known as the theory that markets can be self-regulating. The fundamental problem with such a theory is that markets never have been self-regulating. There is not a single example in all of human history of markets taking care of themselves. As early as 1944 in his classic THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION, Karl Polanyi carefully worked his way through not only human history but also prehistory to show that markets have never tended towards self-regulation -- which, if as the Vienna School argued, it was the natural way that economic institutions tended towards. In fact, markets throughout human history have involved tremendous cultural and political involvement.
The natural response of the Neoliberals has been that if only government would get out of the way, market economies would function according to their meticulously laid out theories. This response, Polanyi argued, pointed to the true nature of theories insisting that markets can be self-regulating: they are pure Utopian pipe dreams. Because the theories point to pure imaginaries, not anything that can ever be actual, they can always respond to any failure of free marketism that the problem was that the market was not sufficiently unregulated and unfettered.
But the brute truth is that there is no tendency for markets to self-regulate and that in fact they cannot so do. Naomi Klein's book details in horrific detail the attempts of a string of politicians and businessmen to attempt to make the impossible actual, with unvarying catastrophic results. She details one instance after another of groups of politicians forcing -- frequently at the ends of bayonets -- countries to embrace what has come to be known as The Washington Consensus, as Milton Friedman's version of the idea has come to be known. These men and women have held that nations' need to go through shocks to their economies, abandoning programs that protect markets, provide sustenance to the poor, liberalize their economies, and dismantle strong central governments. These "shocks" are often accompanied with tremendous suppression of individual liberties, torture of the political opposition, and the wholesale selling of national assets to foreign corporations. Nevermind that there are scant examples of The Washington Consensus actually working towards the economic well being of countries. Well, unless you define "well-being" as the dramatic weakening of the poor and middle classes, and stimulus of extraordinary economic inequality and creation of a narrow economic elite. I'll grant that neoliberalism is a wonderful tool for creating millionaires and billionaires, but the cost is that most citizens suffer loss and a lowered quality of life.
Reading Klein's book is like reading a series of horror stories. Over and over and over the same atrocities take place. Insanity like this should not exist, but because the IMF and the World Bank has institutionalized these insane economic theories, Friedman's ideas have achieved the status of received wisdom, despite their repeated failure when applied to real life.
Hopefully we are entering a period where these absurd economic ideas are jettisoned in favor of economic principles more closely attuned to the real world. Virtually every country in the world with a high standard of living features a managed economy, a form of capitalism in which the national government plays a strong role in managing and regulating. Over the past thirty years I've watched the quality of life in many other nations improve and improve while in the United States we've seen stagnation and decline and growing economic inequality. I've online friends in countries like Norway and Germany with superior healthcare to the US and with astonishing benefits, such as 8 weeks of vacation a year (not to mention unlimited sick days). They also can look forward to richer, more secure retirements. Most Americans are unaware of just how much we have been shortchanged by our economy. Given the Wall Street collapse the whole notion of a self-regulating economy (though inevitably the idiots who have pushed these nonsensical ideas at us in the past will concoct some silly narrative about how government and regulation was the cause of this mess, instead of the reverse) we are likely to see a short-term eclipse of free marketism. Right now Keynes looks like the great wise owl and Friedman a silly goose, but if we aren't on guard some will try to reverse that. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that people's economic memories extend to about a decade. Sometime around 2018 people will forget the mess that the economic and political philosophies generated both domestically and abroad by the ideas of Friedman and his ilk. This is why books like Naomi Klein's are so valuable. Though The Washington Consensus is currently discredited, it will stage a comeback. We need this book to remind us why we should resist that. We've seen thought similar to neoliberalism on several prior occasions. It lay behind much of the economic thought that led to the economic catastrophes of the 1890s, the 1920s, and today. It will unquestionably rear its ugly head again in the future. But next time we need to fight and resist. And Klein's book will remind us precisely why we must.
Some good points. Finishes weekly. December 7, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Very interesting topic and history. The author raises some great points about changes being jammed through with fear and shock. What I don't think she ever challenges is that there are some serious short comings to other systems not just the free market economies. I also think she was identified problems but may oversimplify by blaming it all on the free traders and not enough on incompotent politicians and academians. I thought the there were some good topics (History of Argentina and Russia) in the book but she did not tie it completely together for me. Worth a read but I think she may assign too much blame to free trade and not enough where it may squarely lie.
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