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Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (Doubleday, 2000) Reissued by Anchor in paperback in 2000. Frank's book offers an uncomforting insight to all investors whose finances still suffer from the late-1990's stock market bubble. If they had read his analysis of the rise of market populism earlier on, they would not have become such an easy prey in what Frank calls the decade's "tableaux of greed, legislative turpitude, and transparently self-serving sophistry." For all others, Frank, a Midwesterner with a Ph.D. in American History from Chicago, offers an acid debunking of the myths of the "New Economy". A regular writer for Wall Street Journal, Harper's, and The Nation, Frank forcefully argues that the New Economy was a fraud, management theory was mostly public relations, and the core of "hip" capitalism wasn't different from its gray, much-maligned predecessors. In 358 pages, backed up with 40 pages of notes, Frank delivers a forceful and witty swan song on Nineties entrepreneurs' ultimately successful attempts to persuade the world that free markets and laissez-faire policy were hugely beneficial and included the will and interests of all. Frank places most of the blame on the rise of "market populism," the consensus by economists, politicians, and American business leaders that markets reflected the democratic will of the people and are thus inherently good for the future of mankind. The premise that emerged throughout the Nineties, writes Frank, was that "in addition to being mediums of exchange, markets were mediums of consent." In its struggle for legitimacy, the free-market doctrine was grounded "in something decidedly un-conservative; it was a consensus based not on obedience to God or deference to great men but on the volatile new idea that social conflict affirmed the principles of the market." That doctrine destroyed a former American paradigm, however. The land of the "universal middle class" palpably changed. Although America's productivity, economic growth, and stock markets soared, the majority of American workers did not profit from the boom. And all those funky Internet companies with their pretense of democratization didn't change the system after all. Despite its length, the book is a surprisingly easy and mostly funny read, although it gets repetitive after some time. To Frank's credit, the book displays much of his literary fervor, evident in his quarterly magazine "The Baffler" magazine, a Chicago-based venue of cultural criticism that aims to "unmask the pretensions of the lifestyle liberals." Although the book was published at a time when markets were still roaring, reviews were mostly positive. "Frank is a wry and reliable guide" to the "current alloy of predatory capitalism, youth culture, and populist demagoguery," the Village Voice decided, while The New York Times found the book to be a "414-page exercise of skepticism that possesses all the subtlety of a Molotov cocktail," laden with "a lot of repetition and a fair amount of tedium." A review in the New York Observer credits him with detecting the "hoax which would have us believe that billionaire and busboy are now the same." MORE: Frank’s quarterly magazine “The Baffler” Village Voice Review Salon.com Review An Audio Interview with Frank |
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