Sunday, December 19, 2010

"23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism"

New from Bloomsbury USA: 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang.

About the book, from the publisher:
A concise blast of iconoclastic, eye-opening economic truth-telling; essential reading to understand where free market thinking falls short.

Thing 1: There is no such thing as free market.
Thing 4: The washing machine has changed the world more than the Internet.
Thing 5: Assume the worst about people, and you get the worst.
Thing 13: Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.

If you've wondered how we did not see the economic collapse coming, Ha-Joon Chang knows the answer: We didn't ask what they didn't tell us about capitalism. This is a lighthearted book with a serious purpose: to question the assumptions behind the dogma and sheer hype that the dominant school of neoliberal economists-the apostles of the freemarket-have spun since the Age of Reagan.

Chang, the author of the international bestseller Bad Samaritans, is one of the world's most respected economists, a voice of sanity-and wit-in the tradition of John Kenneth Galbraith and Joseph Stiglitz. 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism equips readers with an understanding of how global capitalism works-and doesn't. In his final chapter, "How to Rebuild the World," Chang offers a vision of how we can shape capitalism to humane ends, instead of becoming slaves of the market.
Ha-Joon Chang is Reader in the Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about his research and publications at his Cambridge webpage.

The Page 99 Test: Bad Samaritans.