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Not that it's likely to be bad, but i can't get too excited about Klein's book. There were similar left-wing analyses of the Irish potato famine back in the 19th c. Many of today's therapies for today's paranoia are derived from the Cold War. The arguments are also structurally similar to the critiques of Reagan-Thatcherite crisis-mongering back in the eighties. And really, why shouldn't they be?
From what i've read in the Guardian, Klein construes basic capitalist processes/tendencies as a certain type of rogue capitalism. Yes, i'd agree that you could regulate this and that and come up with some Keynesian or social democrat variant of capitalism that wouldn't be quite as bad. However, unlike Klein, i lack faith in a benign market.
Speaking of capitalist crises and their management, i worked for the University of Chicago's Lab School back in the Reagan years. At some point in my tenure, the University reorganised itself so that it's internal organisation became a shining example of the ideology it exported to places like Chile. In essence, the reorganisation was nothing more than a single-minded monetarisation of internal transactions. In practical terms, this meant that when the Lab School library called a janitor because some kid had puked, the Plant Dept. billed the Lab School X dollars an hour for the cleanup. Presto! Instant fiscal crisis!
The net effect of this artificial fiscal "crunch" was to strengthen the hand of university bureaucrats. Suddenly they were steering the university through a "crisis". Having convinced the community that university decisions should be made on monetary terms, more power accrued to them as the self-appointed arbiters of financial prudence.
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