Thank you Crown Publishing for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own. No review was required in return for an advance reading copy and no review was promised.
Mr. Book reviewed Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison.
As the authors defined the problem: “The role of governments, neoliberals claim, should be to eliminate the obstacles that prevent the discovery of the natural hierarchy. They must cut taxes, shed regulation, privatize public service, curtail protest, diminish the power of trade unions and eradicate collective bargaining. In doing so, they will liberate the market, freeing entrepreneurs to generate the wealth that will enhance the lives of all.” It a right-wing economic view that has the inevitable result of the rich get richer, at the expense of everyone else, while having the big element of trickle down (aka “voodoo”) economics.
I agree with the authors that neoliberalism isn’t really free market economics, but instead “it’s quite the opposite. Neoliberalism is the tool used by the very rich to accumulate more wealth. Neoliberalism is class war.”
The effects of neoliberalism have been disastrous for the world. Just in the US, “Since 1989, America’s super-rich have gown about $21 trillion richer. The poorest 50 percent, by contrast, have become $900 billion poorer.” And the doctrine has also wrecked great havoc around the rest of the planet.
The book points out that even seeing the devastation that neoliberalism wrecked on the world economy in 2007, the doctrine is still dominant. It is just one of many examples of the terrible effects of neoliberalism that the book describes.
Among the big harms of neoliberalism is how its proponents had gotten the corporatist wing of the Democratic party to embrace it, most notably, the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, thus preventing the party from embracing much equalitarian economic policies that the base of the party desired. The authors made the mistake of claiming “We are all neoliberals now.” Just because corporatist politicians are does not mean the rest of us are too. The author attempts to defend the Clinton and Obama administrations by putting a spin on them they weren’t true believers. But, the record of their actions speaks too loudly. I would have liked the authors to go into detail about that aspect, but their failure to do so didn’t affect the overall message of the book or its quality.
I give this book an A. Amazon, Goodreads and NetGalley require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an A equates to 5 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).
This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews. It will also be posted at Amazon, as soon as the book is released to the public on June 4.
Mr. Book originally finished reading this on May 31, 2024.
