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queenluaBack in March, a friend of mine went on a long, glorious rant with the grand theory of How America Got Broken. Roughly,
* ironically, the Soviet Union kinda motivated social/policy people in post-WWII America to make some pretty serious concessions, actual progress towards further democratization and liberalization, etc—because, y'know, otherwise people may go red and that would be bad. enter heavily managed capitalism and 1950s fiscal policy
* buuuuut then we learned all the wrong lessons from Vietnam, among them, reducing the involvement of the average person in war and policy making; and also, financing such a long and pointless war totally destroyed the Breton Woods system which had been holding the whole global-managed-capitalism thing together
* after the labor class's ability to organize gets annihilated, the middle manager rises as a sort of weird new class to prevent this from just being Weird Feudalism, but like, fuck those guys, etc
* but you do get some nice economic booms in the meantime
* ...but really NAFTA is where The Jig Was Up, etc
Anyway, after her rant, I was like, "I have no idea what a Breton Woods is and really could stand to know more about the macroeconomics of the past century in general. Have any book recs?" And she shoved this one in my face.
I'm not an economist, and thus not at all qualified to evaluate the book on its technical merits (the consensus from the reviews I skimmed seemed to be "basically bang-on when it comes to the history, though he's a little conspiratorial when it comes to some of the motivations sometimes, and also uh, obviously some of the predictions from the last chapter didn't pan out," which seems GOOD ENOUGH TO ME).
I can say it was a really entertaining and informative overview of The US In The World Economy, from The Great Depression to aaaalmost the present. I now know what Breton Woods is! And why real wages are stagnant even though productivity keeps going up! And how that whole US-floating-debt shell game actually works (like, I'd vaguely heard from economists before "look the US can float tons of debt because the US dollar is really valuable and also if we ever defaulted everyone would get screwed," but the book gave me an actual detailed explanation of how this state of affairs came to be.)
The other reason to read this book is that Varoufakis seems like a fabulous jackass and I love him. Exhibit A: check out the dude's self-authored Goodreads biography. Honestly that's the only exhibit you need; just imagine that guy writing a whole book. (But I also admire the principled lefty-ness in his recalcitrance—multiple times in The Global Minotaur, he refuses to use the term "war", replacing it instead with "organized murder." Like. Dude's not wrong, but damn. I want to have a beer with this man and he'll probably be a huge asshole and he'll be irritatingly wrong about some stuff but also irritatingly correct on other stuff, yaknow?
also, i swear that's the last of the book posts for a while! sorry to flood your reading pages, y'all, i've been meaning to write some of those up for months, and wound up just... doin' em all in one go, lolwhups
* ironically, the Soviet Union kinda motivated social/policy people in post-WWII America to make some pretty serious concessions, actual progress towards further democratization and liberalization, etc—because, y'know, otherwise people may go red and that would be bad. enter heavily managed capitalism and 1950s fiscal policy
* buuuuut then we learned all the wrong lessons from Vietnam, among them, reducing the involvement of the average person in war and policy making; and also, financing such a long and pointless war totally destroyed the Breton Woods system which had been holding the whole global-managed-capitalism thing together
* after the labor class's ability to organize gets annihilated, the middle manager rises as a sort of weird new class to prevent this from just being Weird Feudalism, but like, fuck those guys, etc
* but you do get some nice economic booms in the meantime
* ...but really NAFTA is where The Jig Was Up, etc
Anyway, after her rant, I was like, "I have no idea what a Breton Woods is and really could stand to know more about the macroeconomics of the past century in general. Have any book recs?" And she shoved this one in my face.
I'm not an economist, and thus not at all qualified to evaluate the book on its technical merits (the consensus from the reviews I skimmed seemed to be "basically bang-on when it comes to the history, though he's a little conspiratorial when it comes to some of the motivations sometimes, and also uh, obviously some of the predictions from the last chapter didn't pan out," which seems GOOD ENOUGH TO ME).
I can say it was a really entertaining and informative overview of The US In The World Economy, from The Great Depression to aaaalmost the present. I now know what Breton Woods is! And why real wages are stagnant even though productivity keeps going up! And how that whole US-floating-debt shell game actually works (like, I'd vaguely heard from economists before "look the US can float tons of debt because the US dollar is really valuable and also if we ever defaulted everyone would get screwed," but the book gave me an actual detailed explanation of how this state of affairs came to be.)
The other reason to read this book is that Varoufakis seems like a fabulous jackass and I love him. Exhibit A: check out the dude's self-authored Goodreads biography. Honestly that's the only exhibit you need; just imagine that guy writing a whole book. (But I also admire the principled lefty-ness in his recalcitrance—multiple times in The Global Minotaur, he refuses to use the term "war", replacing it instead with "organized murder." Like. Dude's not wrong, but damn. I want to have a beer with this man and he'll probably be a huge asshole and he'll be irritatingly wrong about some stuff but also irritatingly correct on other stuff, yaknow?
also, i swear that's the last of the book posts for a while! sorry to flood your reading pages, y'all, i've been meaning to write some of those up for months, and wound up just... doin' em all in one go, lolwhups
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