One Market Under God
by Thomas Frank
Doubleday
Had Thomas Frank done his homework, his latest book, "One Market Under God," could have been worthwhile. Had he been more thorough in his research, his book could have persuasively debunked the much-hyped notion that the buying and selling of goods and services expresses perfectly the will of the people.
The Book That Might Have Been would have helped readers who are figuring out their opinions about urgent topics, such as whether the nation should replace its common Social Security program with private retirement accounts. After reading such a book, readers wouldn't simply sign on to a privatization plan merely because it fit the media dogma that society will always be better off if it allows businesses to buy and sell everything to everybody without exception. Frank is a skeptical yet vivid writer, and he could have assaulted the talking heads on CNBC, the cable business channel, with the same pyrotechnic wit he displayed in his recent pieces for Harper's and The Nation.
Frank is knowledgable, too, with a Ph.D. in American history at the University of Chicago. After studying the social critics of the early 1900s, he extended the skeptical tradition of that time by becoming a social critic of today's concentrations of power as editor of The Baffler, a small magazine of social criticism. He has done research, such as attend management training courses and ad agency meetings, to challenge widespread ideas about markets.
Sadly, Frank makes lots of little gaffes that undermine a reader's faith in his larger arguments. Frank blames the rhetoric of magazines, such as Worth and Money, for encouraging millions of Americans to invest in the stock market on false promises of receiving riches. He claims too much, though. These magazines reach a few million readers total. Ditto for CNBC. The real causes of the flood of tens of millions of middle class newcomers into the stock market during the 1990s was the suddenly bulging numbers of middle aged people, because the Baby Boom had reached its 50s. Moreover, the 401(k) and Roth IRA tax shelters were introduced in the early 1990s, yet Frank astonishingly never mentions them in his explanation of why Americans entered the market in such large numbers.
Frank goofs up other details in his 400-page presentation. He criticizes several publications, such as Forbes ASAP and Fast Company, for spreading gasbag rhetoric about "the New Economy." But despite piling on minute detail after minute detail from these publications and other books, he only mentions Business Week once, and even then merely in an unrelated context. This omission is odd, given that
Business Week was the true drum marshal for "the New Economy"
and is considered by many market watchers to have birthed the term.
He also implies that wage or salary earners have been suckered by
television commercials into thinking that there's no difference
between the working class and the rich, because so many of both
groups own stock in companies. Yet he cites no surveys to prove that "class confusion." In fact, data archived at the Harris polling service site shows that American attitudes toward Wall Street and businessmen haven't changed during the past several years, while rising conservatism
about the government's role in the economy has been a trend of
several decades in duration, predating the 1990s bull market.
Is this a critique of tangental issues instead of the red meat of Frank's
argument? No, because these aren't tangents; these are the building
blocks of his argument. Many of his claims are not backed up by
evidence or scholarly references. He attacks unrestricted free trade,
for instance. Admittedly, Frank is entitled to disagree with every single
economist who has won the Nobel prize. Yet he should respect his
readers enough to give them a considered counter-argument, which he doesn't.
Similarly, Frank ignored economist Robert Frank (of no relation) and his widely discussed 1999 book "Luxury Fever," which offered a partial remedy for many of the social ills that upset both authors (hint: it's progressive taxation). Frank offers no ideas for ways for readers to defend themselves against the media dogma he dislikes.
What's most infuriating about Frank is that he could do so much better. Liberalism needs every good writer it can find. Sadly, Frank seems more interested in crafting sentences to prove to people that he is not a fool. The following is a typical Frank sentence: "The most powerful symbolic weapon in the arsenal of market populism was the astonishing new information technology of the decade, to which all manner of cosmic significance could be attributed and from which no end of lessons could be drawn."
Note the snigger, the distancing, the mock exaggeration, the proof that the speaker is not a fool. If you like sentences like that, you'll like this book. But if you like carefully considered critique of today's culture, you'll have to look elsewhere.
— Sean O'Neill (NewsFromDC@cs.com)
