The first chapter, "Do-Gooders Gone Bad," is perhaps the lightest, but its opening paragraph hints at the central problem with which the book is concerned, whether in politics or in finance, and its dark humour sets the tone for the rest of the book.
It is a shame that the world improvers don't set off some signal before they go bad, like a fire alarm that is running out of juice. Maybe some adjustment could be made. Instead, the most successful of them — such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler — actually gain market share as they get worse. Their delusions are self-reinforcing, like the delusions of a stock market bubble; the higher the prices go, the more people come to believe they make sense.Bonner and Rajiva don't put much stock in do-gooders and world improvers, nor in the over-bloated and fickle financial markets.
But how can you talk about figures like Mussolini and Hitler, some people may rightly ask, and crack jokes? The answer, I suspect, is that humour is a useful distancing tool. They are not making light of the suffering caused by these figures, but they think about things most people prefer not to. In the context of the inevitable and very devastating U.S. housing bust on the horizon they remark that they make it their business "to think about precisely what most people can't bear thinking about." And to think about these things to understand why they happen again and again and again, and why the masses inevitably get caught up in the momentum no matter how nasty things get, one must "get close enough to see how things work — like a prairie dog peering into a hay bailer — but not so close that you get caught up in it yourself."
The authors cover a lot of ground in Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets. They discuss modern world-improvers-cum-dictators like Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Empires intent on improving the world — Greek, Arab, Assyrian, Frankish, British and now American. Terrorism in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries created in large part by European Crusaders who decided to "bring the blessings of Christian governance to the desert tribes" to terrorism today inspired by America's attempt at bringing "freedom and democracy" to the Muslim world. They cover mass hysteria and paranoia from the witch hunts in the late Middle Ages to the McMartin Satanic child abuse trials across America in the 1980s. They discuss the players in the financial world, from incompetent and grossly overpaid CEOs, to multinational corporations sucking the land dry in far-off countries, to advocates of globalization and the flat earth, to the IMF, World Bank, and the Federal Reserve, as well as the debt, real estate, and trade deficit bubbles. And then, of course, there is the role of propaganda and the media, from Germany to Britain to China and once again to America.
Article comments
1 - Heloise
I happened on this book in the library last month, when I had money in the markets. It was a bit scary to read. I read other books on the market at the same time and all said one thing: You can't beat the market, it will beat you first. That said, buy stocks like you buy groceries, a little at a time from stores you trust.
Heloise