One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy is a 2000 book by historian and author Thomas Frank. [1] It was published by Anchor Books.
The book traces the development of what Frank decries as market populism : "the idea that markets are a far more democratic form of organization than democratically elected governments." He also discusses many facets of the New Economy, "culture studs," and internet brokerages.
An excerpt of the book was the cover story of the October 12, 2000 issue of The Nation . [2]
One topic that Frank devotes considerable page space to is television commercials, especially those for brokerages and mutual funds. He cites many examples of corporations being compared to rock stars, the Civil Rights Movement and the French Revolution and God.
Frank discusses the Beardstown Ladies, an informal investment group comprising elderly women from Beardstown, Illinois. He covers their usage by the media to promote the idea (mostly fallacious, in Frank's estimation) that Average Joe Americans were just as good as, if not better than, professionals at picking stocks.
It was reviewed in The American Prospect on December 18, 2000, [3] in The New York Times on December 21, 2000 [4]
Joseph Alois Schumpeter was an Austrian political economist. He later emigrated to the US and, in 1939, he obtained American citizenship. He was born in Moravia, and briefly served as Finance Minister of German-Austria in 1919. In 1932, he became a professor at Harvard University where he remained until the end of his career.
Right-wing politics embraces the view that certain social orders and hierarchies are inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position on the basis of natural law, economics, or tradition. Hierarchy and inequality may be seen as natural results of traditional social differences or competition in market economies. The term right-wing can generally refer to "the conservative or reactionary section of a political party or system".
Neoliberalism or neo-liberalism is the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with economic liberalism and free-market capitalism. It is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, austerity and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society; however, the defining features of neoliberalism in both thought and practice have been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. In policymaking, neoliberalism was part of a paradigm shift away from the prevailing Keynesian economic consensus that existed prior to the persistent stagflation of the 1970s.
World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability is a 2003 book by the American law professor Amy Chua. It is an academic study of ethnic and sociological divisions in the economic and political systems of various societies. The book discusses the concept of market-dominant minorities, defined as ethnic minority groups who, under given market conditions, tend to dominate economically, often significantly, over all other ethnic groups in the country.
Michael Albert is an American economist, speaker, writer, and political critic. Since the late 1970s, he has published books, articles, and other contributions on a wide array of subjects. He has also set up his own media outfits, magazines, and podcasts. He is known for helping to develop the socioeconomic theory of participatory economics.
The Third Way is a political philosophy and political position akin to centrism that attempts to reconcile right-wing and left-wing politics by advocating a varying synthesis of centre-right and centrist economic platforms with some centre-left social policies. The Third Way was created as a re-evaluation of political policies within various centre-left progressive movements in response to doubt regarding the economic viability of the state and the overuse of economic interventionist policies that had previously been popularised by Keynesianism, but which at that time contrasted with the rise of popularity for neoliberalism and the New Right starting in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. The Third Way has been promoted by social liberal and social-democratic parties. In the United States, a leading proponent of the Third Way was then-President Bill Clinton.
Thomas Carr Frank is an American political analyst, historian, and journalist. He co-founded and edited The Baffler magazine. Frank is the author of the books What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004) and Listen, Liberal (2016), among others. From 2008 to 2010 he wrote "The Tilting Yard", a column in The Wall Street Journal.
Market populism, coined by Thomas Frank, is the concept that the free market is more democratic than any democracy. Frank himself does not believe this premise and sets forth arguments against it in his book One Market Under God. The concept received major widespread prominence in the 1990s when it was used to justify the New Economy, which consisted of a long bullish trend, and support for the free market.
Centre-right politics, or center-right politics, lean to the right of the political spectrum, but are closer to the centre than others. From the 1780s to the 1880s, there was a shift in the Western world of social class structure and the economy, moving away from the nobility and mercantilism, as well as moving toward the bourgeoisie and capitalism. This general economic shift toward capitalism affected centre-right movements, such as the UK Conservative Party, that responded by becoming supportive of capitalism.
Ha-Joon Chang is a South Korean institutional economist, specialising in development economics. Currently he is a reader in the Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge. Chang is the author of several widely discussed policy books, most notably Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002). In 2013, Prospect magazine ranked Chang as one of the top 20 World Thinkers.
An economic ideology distinguishes itself from economic theory in being normative rather than just explanatory in its approach. Economic ideologies express perspectives on the way an economy should run and to what end, whereas the aim of economic theories is to create accurate explanatory models to describe how an economy currently functions. However, the two are closely interrelated, as underlying economic ideology influences the methodology and theory employed in analysis. The diverse ideology and methodology of the 74 Nobel laureates in economics speaks to such interrelation.
The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World is a 2007 memoir of former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, co-authored by Peter Petre, a former executive editor at Fortune magazine. Published on September 17, 2007, the book debuted at the top of the New York Times Bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction. Penguin Press reportedly paid him an $8 million advance.
Social democracy is a political, social and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal-democratic polity and a capitalist-oriented mixed economy. The protocols and norms used to accomplish this involve a commitment to representative and participatory democracy, measures for income redistribution, regulation of the economy in the general interest and social-welfare provisions. Due to longstanding governance by social-democratic parties during the post-war consensus and their influence on socioeconomic policy in Northern and Western Europe, social democracy became associated with Keynesianism, the Nordic model, the social-liberal paradigm and welfare states within political circles in the late 20th century. It has been described as the most common form of Western or modern socialism as well as the reformist wing of democratic socialism.
The capitalist peace, or capitalist peace theory, posits that developed market-oriented economies have not engaged in war with each other, and rarely enter into low-level disputes. In this regard, "economic development" is tacitly equalled with capitalism. These ideas have been proposed as an explanation for the democratic peace theory by accounting for both democracy and the peace among democratic nations. The exact nature of the causality depends upon both the proposed variable and the measure of the indicator for the concept used.
Throughout modern history, a variety of perspectives on capitalism have evolved based on different schools of thought.
Authoritarian socialism, or socialism from above, is an economic and political system supporting some form of socialist economics while rejecting political liberalism. As a term, it represents a set of economic-political systems describing themselves as socialist and rejecting the liberal-democratic concepts of multi-party politics, freedom of assembly, habeas corpus and freedom of expression, either due to fear of the counter-revolution or as a means to socialist ends. Several countries, most notably the Soviet Union, China and their allies, have been described by journalists and scholars as authoritarian socialist states.
Democratic socialism is a political philosophy supporting political democracy within a socially owned economy, with a particular emphasis on economic democracy, workplace democracy and workers' self-management within a market socialist economy or some form of a decentralised planned socialist economy. Democratic socialists argue that capitalism is inherently incompatible with the values of freedom, equality and solidarity and that these ideals can only be achieved through the realisation of a socialist society. Although most democratic socialists seek a gradual transition to socialism, democratic socialism can support either revolutionary or reformist politics as means to establish socialism. As a term, democratic socialism was popularised by social democrats and other socialists who were opposed to the authoritarian socialist development in Russia and elsewhere during the 20th century.
Economic democracy is a socioeconomic philosophy that proposes to shift decision-making power from corporate managers and corporate shareholders to a larger group of public stakeholders that includes workers, customers, suppliers, neighbours and the broader public. No single definition or approach encompasses economic democracy, but most proponents claim that modern property relations externalize costs, subordinate the general well-being to private profit and deny the polity a democratic voice in economic policy decisions. In addition to these moral concerns, economic democracy makes practical claims, such as that it can compensate for capitalism's inherent effective demand gap.
Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Nationalism, Populism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy is a book by conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg.
Frank is to be commended for his extraordinary endurance in simply collecting and cataloging the range of atavistic poppycock that sustains most conventional commentary on markets
Mr. Frank is, in his way, trying to restore a languishing tradition — social criticism — and bring it to a popular audience, reaching back to the time of Edmund Wilson and the preternaturally cranky H. L. Mencken.