Posted by
Conservative Swordfighters Club on Thursday, April 19, 2007 6:14:01 AM
On pages 68 and 69 of the April 16 issue of the left-leaning Time magazine, a review of seven authors who have “made us rethink economics”
1. Deep Economy by Bill McKibben
Liberal? Yes, I think so: McKibben is a former writer at the New Yorker and a longtime environmental activist. The “big idea” is that the marketplace drives behavior that is gruesomely damaging to the earth’s ecology and increasingly unproductive of human happiness.
2. Malcolm Gladwell
Books: Blink; The Tipping Point
Tipping Point is about how little things can have big consequences
Blink is about how sometimes quick decisions can be better than thought-out ones
Don’t know Gladwell’s political views
3. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
From the excerpts I’ve seen, the book appears to skewer liberal assumptions more than conservative ones.
4. The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
Big Idea: “Brilliant experts have biases and blind spots. Crowds don’t”
Liberal? The book doesn’t necessarily sound like it, but on the other hand, Surowiecki is a columnist for the New Yorker
5. Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
Liberal? Yes: A graduate of Reed College, Ehrenreich took a series of low-paying jobs and tried to live on her earnings: “The result is a devastating deromanticization of the myth that you can have a good life if you just work hard.”
6. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins
“Perkins claims to have worked on behalf of the NSA; the government disagrees”
Perkins claims his job was to browbeat developing nations into accepting contracts, that the money was funneled into US corporations, resulting in debt which would lead to the nation being a slave of the US.
Liberal? Sounds like it, because his book sounds like fiction, not non-fiction
7. The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman
Big Idea: “It is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on more different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in history”
Liberal? The book doesn’t necessarily sound like it, but on the other hand, Friedman is a columnist for the very liberal New York Times
---Swordfish