MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewIn an early chapter, Klein compares radical capitalist economic policy to shock therapy administered by psychiatrists ... The connection with a rogue C.I.A. scientist is overdramatic and unconvincing, but for Klein the larger lessons are clear ... Klein is not an academic and cannot be judged as one. There are many places in her book where she oversimplifies. But [Milton] Friedman and the other shock therapists were also guilty of oversimplification ... the case against [their] policies is even stronger than the one Klein makes ... she travels the world to find out firsthand what really happened on the ground during the privatization of Iraq, the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, the continuing Polish transition to capitalism and the years after the African National Congress took power in South Africa, when it failed to pursue the redistributionist policies enshrined in the Freedom Charter, its statement of core principles. These chapters are the least exciting parts of the book, but they are also the most convincing ... Some readers may see Klein’s findings as evidence of a giant conspiracy, a conclusion she explicitly disavows. It’s not the conspiracies that wreck the world but the series of wrong turns, failed policies, and little and big unfairnesses that add up. Still ... Klein ends on a hopeful note, describing nongovernmental organizations and activists around the world who are trying to make a difference.
Anand Giridharadas
PositiveThe New York TimesWell, prepare for a new genre: books gently and politely skewering the corporate titans who claim to be solving such problems [of social inequality]... Anand Giridharadas, a former columnist for The New York Times, spoke about this phenomenon at an Aspen Institute conference in 2015, and he takes his ideas further in his entertaining and gripping new book ... He beautifully catches the language of Aspen, Davos and the recently extant Clinton Global Initiative, which will doubtless reappear in the newly born Bloomberg initiative. It’s a world of feel-good clichés like \'win-win\' and \'make a difference\' ... At Davos and the other international conclaves where the muckety-mucks celebrate the new economic world they have helped create, which has rewarded them so amply, corporate leaders move seamlessly from sessions discussing the risks of climate change, growing inequality and financial instability, to dinners at which they praise tax cuts for billionaires and corporations and applaud proposals for deregulation ... Giridharadas rightly argues that this misallocation of resources creates a grave opportunity cost ... He writes on two levels—seemingly tactful and subtle—but ultimately he presents a devastating portrait of a whole class, one easier to satirize than to reform. Perhaps recognizing the intractability and complexity of the fix we are in, Giridharadas sidesteps prescriptions ... The subtitle of the book says it all: \'The Elite Charade of Changing the World.\'
