hikemogan's review against another edition
4.0
If there were two overall themes guiding this book, I'd say it was these:
During the late 1990s, it was pretty obvious that a rising tide was not lifting all boats. And for a very long time now, conservative and many liberal economists, business owners, investors, business writers and assorted pundits have equated democracy with the ebbs and flows of the free market.
My intro to Frank came through this book with it's marathon chapters, sometimes repetitive thesis', and thoroughly damning evidence of our nation's continuing problems with a form of tulip mania and the delusion that a janitor/schoolteacher/truck driver playing the stock market with a few shares has economic parity with someone like Warren Buffett.
The title itself is an interesting look at the subject matter here: free market economics has long been a dogma among Americans. We are told time and time again that collective bargaining, state investment, and regulations over wages will lead us down the path to destruction. Also, supposedly, if we allow the foxes to guard the hen house, someday we can all be rich.
Frank points out that this isn't a new ideology but it has become more and less popular over time. The end of the 20th century resembled the beginning more than any other time; the middle class was slowly eroding and obscene wealth consoled obscene lack of wealth with idea that even if you're living in poverty, you can just make a couple of smart investments, spend wisely, and the idea of the American Dream will be fulfilled and you'll get wealthy.
This might all seem painfully obvious, but Frank deserves credit for actually documenting it.
During the late 1990s, it was pretty obvious that a rising tide was not lifting all boats. And for a very long time now, conservative and many liberal economists, business owners, investors, business writers and assorted pundits have equated democracy with the ebbs and flows of the free market.
My intro to Frank came through this book with it's marathon chapters, sometimes repetitive thesis', and thoroughly damning evidence of our nation's continuing problems with a form of tulip mania and the delusion that a janitor/schoolteacher/truck driver playing the stock market with a few shares has economic parity with someone like Warren Buffett.
The title itself is an interesting look at the subject matter here: free market economics has long been a dogma among Americans. We are told time and time again that collective bargaining, state investment, and regulations over wages will lead us down the path to destruction. Also, supposedly, if we allow the foxes to guard the hen house, someday we can all be rich.
Frank points out that this isn't a new ideology but it has become more and less popular over time. The end of the 20th century resembled the beginning more than any other time; the middle class was slowly eroding and obscene wealth consoled obscene lack of wealth with idea that even if you're living in poverty, you can just make a couple of smart investments, spend wisely, and the idea of the American Dream will be fulfilled and you'll get wealthy.
This might all seem painfully obvious, but Frank deserves credit for actually documenting it.
robertrivasplata's review against another edition
4.0
Frank tells the story of how revolutionary imagery and ideas were co-opted by the advertising and financial businesses, and how free market ideology took over discourse about politics, education, high art, pop culture, labor rights, the environment, and pretty much everything else. The author can get a little hyperbolic at times, but this book goes a long way in answering questions like: "why do we talk about education as if it's a business?" "how is deregulation still taken seriously?" "why do we talk about government as if it's a business?" "why were the 90s so weird?" and "how did we get here?"
Pairs well with such Negativland albums as, Dispepsi, The Perfect Cut, Escape from Noise, Guns, and Crosley Bendix: the Radio Reviews.
Pairs well with such Negativland albums as, Dispepsi, The Perfect Cut, Escape from Noise, Guns, and Crosley Bendix: the Radio Reviews.
kevin_carson's review against another edition
3.0
It's an entertaining read with some worthwhile observations, but Frank's analysis is also incredibly lazy in a lot of ways. He apparently from the observation that assorted neoliberal "market populists" like Tom Peters, Newt Gingrich, Jack Kemp et al talk a lot about "flattening hierarchies," decentralization, distributed networks, and so forth, and then jumps to the incredible conclusion that any discussion of decentralization or replacing hierarchies with networks must be a neoliberal propagandist. He winds up defending bureaucracy and hierarchy as such, and treating the bureaucratic mass production corporation of the mid-20th century as inherently progressive, and any criticism of it as a right-wing Trojan horse. In so doing, he lumps together everything networked and horizontal into an "icky things I don't like" category that includes a lot of the most progressive strands on the left like commons-based peer production.
He reminds me a lot of Doug Henwood, who in a Twitter exchange argued that copyright was progressive and that left-wing currents based on open source, post-scarcity, horizontalism, etc., "sounded like Newt Gingrich."
Frank is far more accurately described as a 20th century managerialist liberal of the Galbraith and Chandler school than a leftist. (I wrote more about this ideological tendency here: https://c4ss.org/content/3094).
He reminds me a lot of Doug Henwood, who in a Twitter exchange argued that copyright was progressive and that left-wing currents based on open source, post-scarcity, horizontalism, etc., "sounded like Newt Gingrich."
Frank is far more accurately described as a 20th century managerialist liberal of the Galbraith and Chandler school than a leftist. (I wrote more about this ideological tendency here: https://c4ss.org/content/3094).
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