Naomi Klein

America may have spent decades fighting the evils of communism, but with The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein shows us the scary side of the free market. “Disaster capitalism,” the idea at the center of Klein’s new book, employs a simple yet sinister formula: disaster strikes, the public panics, and the government promptly takes advantage of the chaos to reengineer the economy as it sees fit—often in favor of privatization. Klein’s hypotheses even venture into revisionist territory, as when she posits that governments have been using disasters to their advantage for years, from Tiananmen Square to Katrina to the I-35 bridge collapse. Whether you think it a call to arms or crackpot conspiracy theory, it’s one of the boldest and most talked-about books of the year.

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