The Shock Doctrine

Speaking of the perfidious Chait, his essay on Naomi Klein in the latest TNR is pretty damn good.

Comments

Ouch. I almost felt sorry for Klein but then I realized she must be making millions off her silly books in this "disaster capitalist" economy. Therefore, according to Klein's own impeccable logic, she herself must be a neocon Milton Friedman acolyte.

I knew it!

Posted by Ahab | July 18, 2008 2:02 PM

Good essay in TNR. I have only two comments.

The relationship between crisis and change needs no discussion. It is obvious that when things are going well, nobody wants change. It takes a crisis for people to recognize a need for change.

As for the anti-globalization movement, it is withering away for two reasons; first, globalization is an accomplished fact, and second, too many people are benefiting from it.

Posted by Mr. Rightman | July 18, 2008 2:25 PM

Naomi Klein is also one of my least favorite people.

Posted by Jeff | July 18, 2008 2:27 PM

Most of Jon Chait’s specific criticisms seem valid to me, and, to a lesser extent, so do his larger points about the over-reliance on the shock metaphor and the supposed centrality of economic causation in political analysis. Given some of the errors he documents, it’s good that so grandiose a thesis get poked and prodded to deflate it in its sloppy spots and for its theoretical deficiencies.

But Jon has punctured healthy tissue too, for he paints a misleading impression of Klein’s book, neglecting the fact that most of The Shock Doctrine, as I recall, simply isn’t about Iraq. She has long discussions of the IMF and the World Bank, as well as of the ideology and economic consequences of foreign aid and development economics, including extensive treatments of Bolivia, Argentina, South Africa, Poland, Russia, Indonesia, and other countries. The merits of her analysis on these points are obviously open to debate. But the basic apparent process of the immiseration of masses around the world on the basis of facile and presumptuous western economic assistance measures is an important reality that did not receive remotely adequate coverage through the 1990s, when its implementation was widespread and largely unchallenged (hence the famous “Washington consensus” paradigm). In Russia, in particular, tentatively emerging during that decade from totalitarianism, its results seem to many observers to have been particularly egregious. President Clinton’s handling of Russia policy looks now like an under-examined disaster whose consequences will live with us for many years.

Another theme that emerged from Klein’s discussion to which Jon gives short shrift is not just that free markets do not always bring democracy and that American discussion often emphasizes the presence of the former to the exclusion of the latter, but, more explosively, that free market policies have often been implemented through large-scale violence and other forms of political repression that received American support or at least our benign neglect. This has been a shameful thing.

As someone who cares a lot about cultural politics, I do not think economics itself simply determines the state of the world. But someone who does use economic dynamics as the lens through which to engage in a study of comparative politics and international relations, while risking flawed and exaggerated causal accounts, can perform a service (and in this instance has) by showing (1) how its influence is often under-recognized, (2) that its professional orthodoxies often merit critique both within the scope of the economics discipline (that is, regarding economic outcomes) and more broadly (that is, in terms of how economic policy has often interacted in troubling ways with democratization), and even (3) at a rhetorical level, insofar as privatization chic and Abramoff- and Custer Battles-style government-corporate chumminess to dubious public benefit achieved a bizarre momentum during the Bush administration far more widely than has been recognized outside the left.

Posted by jason | July 18, 2008 8:22 PM

I found this artile via Arts & Letters Daily. Absolutely loved it.

I wish I was friends with Naomi Klein so I could tell how wrong she is about everything in a meaningful way.

Posted by Lyle | July 22, 2008 2:54 PM