All entries for Wednesday 25 March 2009

Naomi Klein, Milton Friedman and Me

Writing about web page http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/markharrison/comment/shockdoctrine.pdf

On February 24, 2009, by Naomi Klein was awarded the first Warwick International Prize for Writing, for her book The Shock Doctrine. On behalf of the panel of judges, the novelist China Miéville described The Shock Doctrine as "a brilliant, provocative, outstandingly written investigation into some of the great outrages of our time."

That got my attention. Here's why. On August 26, 2008, Kurt Jacobsen reported in The Guardian about opposition to plans to set up a Milton Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago. The report included some claims that I thought were wrong. So, I replied. Here's my letter, published on August 28:

Your feature on Chicago's proposal to establish a Milton Friedman Institute of economic research (Milton Friedman gives Chicago a headache, August 26) is misinformed in some important respects.

You state: "In postwar America, Friedman's market fundamentalism was regarded as lunatic-fringe stuff." This was never the case. I learned economics in Cambridge in the late 1960s. My professors followed Keynes and Marx, but they rightly made Friedman's work part of my undergraduate syllabus. Friedman's scholarship, not his opinions, made him one of the most influential economists of the 20th century.

You state that Friedman "worked for General Pinochet". While Friedman visited Chile, he did not work for the dictator. His advice was that Chile should turn back from state control of economic life; in the long run, he argued, free markets and political freedoms go hand in hand.

Finally, you give the impression that the mission of the proposed Friedman Institute is tendentious: "The design and evaluation of economic policy requires analyses that respect the incentives of individuals and the essential role of markets in allocating goods and services ... design of public policy without regard to market alternatives has adverse social consequences." While such a statement may be infinitely qualified, few economists today would dispute the principle.

I didn't expect to get away scot-free. On August 30, The Guardian published a letter from David Waddilove of Teignmouth, Devon:

Mark Harrison (Letters, August 28) is disingenuous about the relationship of Milton Friedman to Pinochet's Chile. Neither does he mention the havoc, bloodshed and mass starvation wrought on the people and economies of, among others, Uruguay, Argentina, Russia and Iraq by the Chicago School's symbiotic relationship with sundry dictators and their personal financial gain from those relationships. Nor, of course, does he mention the benefits to US corporate power wrought by the destruction of the public sector in each country the Chicago School meddles with. It is sad to see Warwick University, once the harbinger of some radical thought, now accommodating such "free" market orthodoxies without reference to their real-life testing grounds. Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine should be required reading for anyone interested in what actually happened.

I didn't think of replying, but I didn't like the tone. It seemed to be all guilt by association: Chicago-Pinochet. Chicago-Harrison. Harrison-Pinochet. Harrison-Warwick. Warwick-Pinochet. It looked like I must have blood on my hands. If that was the spirit of The Shock Doctrine, I wasn't sure I wanted to read it. Still, it stuck in my mind.

Months went passed. Then, the prize went to ... Naomi Klein for The Shock Doctrine. Not just any prize, but the first biennial Warwick Prize for Writing, a major literary award endowed by a great university, one that I love and have worked and lived for over thirty years.

Maybe I had missed something.

I got hold of the book and read it. It had a big, important message that I wrestled with. I asked my colleagues what they thought about it. It turned out none of them had read it. I think that is a mistake: the book has already had a significant influence on how people see economics and economists, David Waddilove of Teignmouth being one.

After some reflection, I wrote down what I think about the book in a paper called Credibility Crunch: A Comment on The Shock Doctrine. This is how it begins:

If you think that free markets haven’t worked that well recently, it is perhaps not surprising. If you think that free markets are spread only when business executives, politicians, soldiers, technocrats, and economists join to overwhelm popular resistance by force and violence, then you may have read it first in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

It concludes:

For the [Warwick Prize] panel, China Miéville described The Shock Doctrine as "a brilliant, provocative, outstandingly written investigation into some of the great outrages of our time." The Shock Doctrine merits this praise, but it does not merit belief.

If you are still interested, I hope you'll look at my paper and see the reasoning that fills the gap between my opening and my conclusion.

Mark Harrison : 25 Mar 2009 09:12 |  Tags: Globalization Naomi-Klein Politics Using-Data |  Comments (9) |  Close comments |  Report a problem