etc.

For the record, the subtitle of this book is Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. I tried to include it in the heading above but my title field wouldn’t fit it. I thought that was worth mentioning because this is actually a history book, which you wouldn’t know from the title alone. Maybe that’s an indicator to me that I need to read more about the books I read before I read them.

Thomas Frank is very, very readable. In this book, he builds on what he began with The Baffler, the magazine devoted to uncooling American business culture in all its extremes, and assumes the burden of debunking what he calls “market populism”. Market populism is what defines the New Economy, the notion that business and free market economics and all the wealth it produces is what democracy is about, and for Frank, this is the ailment that plagues America today. He holds a few sources responsible for promulgating the fallacy (among them marketing companies, business and management literature, the media and the academy) of the stock market boom in the late 1990s, when everyone who made money on NASDAQ or in mutual funds assumed that their society was better off because their economy was better off (or so the numbers said). The great thing about Frank is that he is an interesting writer, he has the sources to back up his claims, and there is nothing righteous or sanctimonious about the way in which he invalidates a notion that way too many people have been buying into for way too long.