Cost of Crash, 2,800,000,000,000英文资料.pdfVIP

What Crisis? Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, and Vivek Chiver (editors), The Crisis This Time: Socialist Register 2011, Merlin Press, 296 pages, ISBN 9780850367096, £15.95 Fintan O’Toole, Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger, Faber and Faber, 2009, 256 pages, ISBN 9780571260751, £8.99 Reviews 83 Fintan O’Toole, Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic, Faber and Faber, 2010, 272 pages, ISBN 9780571270088 £12.99 ‘Cost of Crash, $2,800,000,000,000’ (Guardian front page headline, 28.10.2008) These books are about ‘crisis’. We throw the word around quite liberally, along with figures with a dozen zeros. The books deal with everything from the falling rate of profit to Catholic corruption and religious narrow- mindedness, Italian, South African, Japanese social structures, and the failure of banking. I counted up thirty crises since 1600 (the beginning of modern capitalism, with the help of Charles Kindleburger’s incisive work). But, what does empirical and theoretical analysis add to our understanding of obvious repetitive events? In other words, what’s the beef about crisis? Why don’t we understand it and why do the books keep pouring out, exclaiming surprise about capitalism, or whatever we wish to call economics, and politics, these days? Some would say that capitalism IS crisis. Confusing enough? The real story is surely about mythology. We live in a world of alleged crisis. Capitalism is nothing objective but a construction of manufactured belief. Here I call on Naomi Klein’s work, plus World Bank analysis (Masters of Illusion by Catherine Caulfield), Amy Chua’s The World on Fire, and others to support my point about crisis and myth. Klein a