A Book Review that's Better Than the Book

Here's a great essay about the most-recent dreadful Thomas L. Friedman book.. As someone who just barely understands "neoliberalism", "globalization" and so forth, but who would love to know more (my father-in-law is a CFO of Deloitte, so finance comes up all the time at Sunday dinners), I found it pretty interesting.

What's great about the review is the comparisons between neoliberalism and communism. In many ways, they're opposite poles, but as the author notes, neoliberalism has reproduced communism's "consistent underestimation of nationalist and religious movements and its unidirectional view of history." Actually, what made communism so horrifically dreadful seems to be the same cause of globalization's miseries- namely, it asserted a "historical inevitability" that was worth whatever blood had to be shed to get there.

What has alyways seemed odd to me about these utopian economic ideas is that they're alleged to be these unquestionably great booms for mankind, but when they don't work out the way they're supposed to (then in China and Russia; now in numerous nations in South America and Africa), it's always the fault of the nations being bankrupt. Just like the Soviet apparatchiks, the World Bank economists seem totally unable to say: "Okay, this isn't working. Let's try something else!"