Before I get into the book, I'm gonna talk about me.
My T refill was, predictably, delayed almost 48 hours, I'm pissed.
Thanks to Octopen's suggestion, and Jamie's help, I got the stickers in the playground draggable, now I can stab Flint with Anne Bonny.
I spent a ridiculous amount of time today customizing my laptop's aesthetics, but I'm happy with how it turned out.
Now, onto the book.
First thing to note, this book is, at the time of this blog post being published, about 14 years old, having been written in 2010, and focuses on the 2009 economic crash in a lot of examples.
I found this book to be very idealist, with the author, Ha-Joon Chang, focusing primarily on how things should work, instead of how they do work. The author is, self-admittedly, a capitalist, or, rather, believes "capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others." He also seems to believe that free market capitalism is one of the worst forms of capitalism, and advocates for stronger restrictions on the market. While these things aren't inherently negative, I found the book hard to engage with because I saw massive oversights, there is almost no mention of how racism has helped to lead us to where we are today, and minimal acknowledgement that there is no incentive for those in power to make any policy changes he has proposed, and he offers no solution to this issue.
And what he does say concerning race is, to me, both racist and idealist, saying that the market will kill racism due to POC being able to meet the same demands as white workers in the labour market.He does at least acknowledge that there is vast inequality in the world, but only gives vague ideas as to what the solutions would be, referencing policy changes and more social welfare.
While this book is filled with good information, I cannot agree with the conclusions the author draws from the information. But I think it's mainly a case of perspective, the author, being an economist by trade, is clearly influenced by that background and education, often ignoring the other aspects at play and trying to make this purely a math equation. I also find the numerous references to his earlier works to be unhelpful.
Overall, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone, but I do think chapters 7-11 have some really good information that combats popular notions. I'm glad I read the book though.
I'm not sure I'll be able to finish my reading list this month, I've had difficulty with motivation after finishing Che, but I'm excited for the next 2 books, so hopefully I'll be able to get through them quickly.
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