First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

3 Responses

1. T Bishop Finger says:

   November 22, 2008 at 2:50 pm

   It seem’s everyone’s boarding the ‘we hate Milton Friedman’ bandwagon started by Naomi Klein hilarious work of fiction, ‘The Shock Doctrine’.
2. Pavel Pelikan says:

   November 29, 2008 at 10:46 am

   Sir, I have several serious objections against Chancellor’s arguments:

   - Greed is not an important argument to require explicit opposition - if it were to be taken seriously, it would be necessary to distinguish between the constructive greed of capitalists and the destructive greed of rent-seeking managers.

   - The attack on bubbles is not very smart either. It is a variant of the old argument for anti-cyclical policies that in most cases, because of ignorance and political decision delays, turned out to be pro-cyclical (the failures of Swedish anti-cyclical policies are nicely documented by Assar Lindbeck). That some guys ex post turned out to have known that something was a bubble is no good argument: others did not know it, and still others cried “bubble” when there was none - by the way, Greenspan did this several times, so Chancellor is entirely wrong accusing him of never warning against bubbles!

   - In general, I am afraid that Chancellor’s thinking is blurred by his hatred for Friedman, which he shows by calling Friedman “über-economist” (as I noted in his curriculum, he has not even studied economics, only history). This hinders him from intelligently distinguishing the many points on which Friedman was right from those on which he may have been mistaken.

   Pavel Pelikan
   Professor, Department of Institutional Economics
   Prague University of Economics, Czech Republic
3. Eric Lam says:

   March 1, 2009 at 8:09 am

   The Shock Doctrine is indoctrinate. I’ve found the PBS feature “Commanding Heights - The Battle for the World Economy” a nice antidote.