Economic Collapse Of The Great Depression Forced

Introduction

The arguments and perspectives that inform One World, Ready or Not are a distillation of an emerging international populist platform in opposition to what Europeans and Latin Americans call "neo liberalism," the economic and political paradigm that has guided Western policy, especially U.S. policy, since Margaret Thatcher installed it in Britain in the 1980s. "There is no alternative," Thatcher used to say in defense of her program of economic reform. Capital markets had to become less regulated and more global; labor markets had to become more flexible; trade had to be more free; government subsidies, spending, and safety nets had to be cut; tax policy had to provide incentives for enterprise.

Discussion

The Keynesian turn of Western economies after the Great Depression and World War II was a ghastly mistake; true capitalism was the less regulated, more chaotic, but freer and ultimately more effective capitalism that held sway in Britain and the United States before 1914 and the long slide to state domination.

There is an alternative, says Greider, and this book is the best shot so far at describing one. In many respects, the volume is a failure. Taking globalization as its subject, and attempting to deal with its economic, social, and political causes and effects, the book is sometimes overwhelmed by the sheer mass of material. Greider jumps, and the exhausted reader attempts to follow, from the factory floors of Indonesia to the slums of Latin America to Bundestag debates to World Bank conference rooms. Along the way, subjects are taken up and dropped at breathtaking -- and, eventually, mind-numbing -- speed, and they are not always thoroughly explored before being cast aside. But in the most important respects, One World is a major accomplishment. Even when he is wrong, Greider remains interesting; fallible humanity can hardly aspire to more.

Readers familiar with the history of economic thought will find many echoes of Marx and Keynes here, but the keystone in Greider's arch is Joseph Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction as the core process of capitalism. One World is at its best a sustained meditation on this concept, and Greider applies the full force of the complex idea to the full range of the capitalist revolution now sweeping the world. The Panglosses of contemporary neo liberalism can see only the utopia waiting to be unleashed as unshackled capitalism transforms the waiting world. Neo-Marxists ...