The Shock Doctrine

July 23, 2007
The neo-liberal economic policies—privatization, free trade, slashed social spending—that the “Chicago School” and the economist Milton Friedman have foisted on the world are catastrophic in two senses, argues this vigorous polemic. Because their results are disastrous—depressions, mass poverty, private corporations looting public wealth, by the author's accounting—their means must be cataclysmic, dependent on political upheavals and natural disasters as coercive pretexts for free-market “reforms” the public would normally reject. Journalist Klein (No Logo
) chronicles decades of such disasters, including the Chicago School makeovers launched by South American coups; the corrupt sale of Russia's state economy to oligarchs following the collapse of the Soviet Union; the privatization of New Orleans's public schools after Katrina; and the seizure of wrecked fishing villages by resort developers after the Asian tsunami. Klein's economic and political analyses are not always meticulous. Likening free-market “shock therapies” to electroshock torture, she conflates every misdeed of right-wing dictatorships with their economic programs and paints a too simplistic picture of the Iraq conflict as a struggle over American-imposed neo-liberalism. Still, much of her critique hits home, as she demonstrates how free-market ideologues welcome, and provoke, the collapse of other people's economies. The result is a powerful populist indictment of economic orthodoxy.

September 1, 2007
Both admirers and detractorsagree that the late Nobel Prize laureate Milton Friedman was an extraordinarily influential economist. Canadian Kleinassails Friedmans free-market precepts as their exponents have applied them to a series of formerly state-dominated economies since 1975, when Friedman persuaded Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to adopt his program. Kleins entirely negative interpretation of the results of shock therapy only lays the foundation for her books thesis: that Friedmans prescriptions require a crisis and are ineluctably bound with the application of violence. This perspective informs her criticismcondemnation, in factof reform programs in the last three decades that have aimed to separate the state from the economy in Bolivia, Poland, Russia, China, the UK, and elsewhere. The process of market liberalization, Klein maintains, has createda disaster capitalism complex, consisting of corporations that thrive on catastrophe;the author particularly arraigns security and logistics firms in the U.S. and Israel. Assiduously researched, energetically expressed, Kleins report bears an ideological perspective that wont leave readers neutral about her economic interpretations.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)