In this groundbreaking book, the bestselling author of No Logo exposes the gripping story of how America's 'free market' policies have come to dominate the world - through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries. At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq's civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country's vast oil reserves. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the 'War on Terror' to Halliburton and Blackwater. After a powerful tsunami devastates the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts. New Orleans' residents, still scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened.These events are examples of what Naomi Klein calls 'the shock doctrine': the use of public disorientation following massive collective shocks - wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters - to push through unpopular economic measures often called 'shock therapy'. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don't succeed in wiping out all resistance, a third is employed: that of the electrode in the prison cell or of the Taser gun. Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Disaster capitalism - the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies that are reeling from shock - did not begin with September 11, 2001.Klein traces its intellectual origins back fifty years to the University of Chicago's economics department under Milton Friedman, whose influence is still felt around the world. She draws new and surprising connections between economic policy, 'shock and awe' warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s; research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay. As Klein shows how the deliberate use of the shock doctrine produced world-changing events from Pinochet's coup in 1973 to the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, she tells a story radically different from the one usually heard. Once again Naomi Klein has written a book that will reframe the debate.

How can we benefit from the promise of government while avoiding the threat it poses to individual freedom? In this classic book, the author provides the definitive statement of his economic philosophy--one in which competitive capitalism serves as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom.

In search of an answer, The Nature and Logic of Capitalism takes us on a far-ranging exploration to the unconscious levels of the human psyche and the roots of domination and submission; to the organization of primitive society and the origins of wealth; to the sources of profit and the conception of a "regime" of capital; to the interplay of relatively slow-changing institutions and the powerful force of the accumulation of wealth. By the end of this tour we have grappled not only with ideas of Adam Smith and Karl Marx but with Freud and modern anthropologists as well. And we are far closer to understanding capitalism in our time, its possibilities and limits.

Following his timely and well-received A Failure of Capitalism , Richard Posner steps back to take a longer view of the continuing crisis of democratic capitalism as the American and world economies crawl gradually back from the depths to which they had fallen in the autumn of 2008 and the winter of 2009. By means of a lucid narrative of the crisis and a series of analytical chapters pinpointing critical issues of economic collapse and gradual recovery, Posner helps non-technical readers understand business-cycle and financial economics, and financial and governmental institutions, practices, and transactions, while maintaining a neutrality impossible for persons professionally committed to one theory or another. He calls for fresh thinking about the business cycle that would build on the original ideas of Keynes. Central to these ideas is that of uncertainty as opposed to risk. Risk can be quantified and measured. Uncertainty cannot, and in this lies the inherent instability of a capitalist economy. As we emerge from the financial earthquake, a deficit aftershock rumbles. It is in reference to that potential aftershock, as well as to the government’s stumbling efforts at financial regulatory reform, that Posner raises the question of the adequacy of our democratic institutions to the economic challenges heightened by the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. The crisis and the government’s energetic response to it have enormously increased the national debt at the same time that structural defects in the American political system may make it impossible to pay down the debt by any means other than inflation or devaluation.

"The solution to inequality, environmental degradation, and other deficits of capitalism is better capitalism. The Power of Creative Destruction draws on cutting-edge research to argue that what we need today is not revolution but reform: pro-competitive policies that enable innovation while compensating for the disruption it causes"--