An account of the destabilizing power of price, and a critique of the free market philosophy that leaves the most vulnerable at the mercy of the commodities markets.
The trouble with such deterministic exercises is that life tends to be more complicated ... Mr. Russell assures us that his logic is 'devilishly simple' and that in commodity prices he has found his 'butterfly.' He means the proverbial insect whose wing flap leads to a hurricane. It seems that he has scarcely seen a butterfly that didn’t cause a hurricane ... Mr. Russell is furious at neoliberalism, but his attack is a muddle ... inflated language ... And he has neoliberalism backward. Whatever its effects on Gary, Ind., global trade brought unprecedented growth to the developing world ... a painful book. It reads like a Twitter feed, a deluge of words in the service of rhetoric.
A skillfully conducted tour of the role of price, once unmoored from reality, in adding chaos to an already chaotic world ... A fresh look at some of the mostly deeply held dogmas of economics, exploding many along the way.
