23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
Ratings22
Average rating3.8
Honestly spent the whole book pumping my fist and going, YES. YYYEEEEEESSSSSS.
I think I also highlighted more than half of it.
Some highlights of the highlights:
- Structual adjustment programs, the World Bank, the 1990s, and how they killed growth.
- Protectionism as a good thing.
- REALLY fun/interesting/provocative stuff about global labor competition - wages in rich countries being a function of immigration control. Really interesting stuff about the interaction effects between immigration control, wages, and class.
- The rise of shareholder capitalism, and its perverse incentives (e.g. businesses avoid making long-term investments, and instead focus on short-term cuts like layoffs and finance tools).
- Lots of really cool historical economics about the “Asian miracle” - e.g. the ENORMOUS and mind-boggling growth + development of South Korea, Taiwan, Japan. Very very cool.
Anyway, a lot of this stuff was also covered in Doughnut Economics. I wish I could take a class with Ha-Joon Chang. I got a lot of other books added to my want-to-read list thanks to this one. Woohooooo economics
I've been reading this over the past couple of weeks. Reading reviews from others as well as thinking about how I have internalized the information here I think the book has some very good points and a few different data backed conclusions that I would like to be explored more. Particularly striking is the claim that open markets do not benefit the nation being opened up if it is developing, I felt like there was some information given to back this claim but not enough to make me feel like it was proven. And I'm rather center-left pro-regulated capitalism. Also striking was the exercise around describing countries without naming the time frame being looked at and guessing what the country was. This was very telling in my opinion.
In some cases the author was preaching to the choir, at least with me. I think I align with the author's views quite a bit. Overall, I liked the book but I do not think it works well to convince people that are dogmatically pro-market without nuance.
Etter å ha lest kortversjonen av Piketty og nå denne boken, blir jeg mer og mer sikker i min sak om at jeg ikke er markedskapitalist. Lettlest og solid om kapitalistiske myter.