★★★★★ 3
Some good footnotes to other histories
Format: Audiobook
This book is impressive in two key ways: first it re-surfaces recurring elements in the political/economic intersect over time (the on-again off-again use of "the gold standard," the company invasion into the intimate life of the laborer) and second it gets into the gory details of policies and logistics that shaped or limited major historical events (like the availability and movement of gold going into WWII). That said, it's pretty massive for providing just those two things.
It comes up weaker from Nixon on to today which undermines its contemporary relevance: it stamps everything from 1980 on as "chaos" and tries to back away slowly. It spends some time on the change in stock ownership of the 1980s (prefer Ho's Liquidated or Nace's Gangs of America; the pivot from pensions to 401ks is lost, Supermoney is not mentioned), spends time on Enron (see also McLean's The Smartest Guys in the Room) but seems to mostly ignore terror and catastrophe (consider Klein's The Shock Doctrine), spends time on the 2008 meltdown (prefer Lewis's The Big Short and Foroohar's Makers & Takers) but comes up short of Occupy Wall Street, VC-fueled gig economy corporations and cryptocurrencies.
I'm suspecting that the "Chaos" isn't so much chaos but rather "Distributed Tactical Illegibility" (to borrow from Scott's Seeing Like a State): where the control of information can be used to cultivate socioeconomic advantage, then powerful people within a state will maintain their privilege through obfuscating the information they're using to create and maintain that advantage -- this is why insider trading is illegal as an abuse of power and trust *but also legal for members of the US legislature*.
It's also a bit weak (at least in Audible form) of noting which bits of economic history would be echoed or reversed over time; tracing the evolution of a social construct through a twisting maze of legal decisions to current incomprehensibility does have this effect.
I did find its larger position interesting, if perhaps a bit lost in the larger prose, that capitalism is about pricing the future into the present and it's gone off the proverbial rails because informational ubiquity compounds short-termism to collapse the future into the present in both public and private enterprise. Or, to put it another way, money can't escape the gravity of our economic expectation for near-horizon growth to invest in a future that our larger society wants and might reasonably expect and while legislators need to govern for the long term they're only elected for the short term and judged by people's everyday-experiences of the social-economy.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2021
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