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Guasto è Il Mondo (2011)

by Tony Judt(Favorite Author)

4.04 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

8842094900 (ISBN13: 9788842094906)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Laterza

review 1: Not sure what to make of this - it's a novella-length rant with the alternative title of "neoliberalism/privatization sucks, and why we should go back to proper social democracy". The focus is on the US and the UK with a little bit of the rest of Western Europe thrown in. One of the best parts in the book is when Judt traces the history of the idea of "me first, others second" from the 18th/19th century until today and shows how this whole mess has spread. My personal problem is that there's nothing new in here for me, all of these points have been discussed in the German left for the last 30 years. Except that his rant doesn't include the "evils" of gentrification.
review 2: I hardly ever read politics/economics books. The exceptions are when I know the author... more isn't an idiot. Tony Judt is no idiot. He has written a very closely argued and passionate book about what is wrong and what we can do to fix it.His main concern is Social Democracy - the idea that the state has to take on things that single people can't do and that for profit entities can't or won't do. Apparently in the last century this wasn't thought of as socialism. Apparently in this century it is. And that is the crux of what is rapidly going wrong as we all well know - the dismantling in the name of "efficiency" of the public trust into the pockets of the connected.Judt isn't solely talking about real, measurable things, though of course as anyone who looked on in horror at the Bush cabal proposals for privatizing Social Security knows, these real and measurable things are quite consequential. Judt also counts the immeasurable and invaluable things that are lost when the public becomes private. His best example is trains.Trains are a wonderful economic playground for what he is getting at. Trains perform a very useful function and they can either be privately or publicly owned. If it is private, they are managed to the dollar (or pound). If it is public, it is managed to the service of the public. If the trains cover small outlying populations then the contradiction inevitably happens. The small villages lose their train service under private ownership - at the expense of a way of life that their ancestors had and in which they had expected to keep. This expense of course is not quantified in private ownership, but this kinds of expenses ARE what make our society. Margaret Thatcher understood this very well and in keeping with that she never rode a train as she detested the public nature of it. Having a strong society energized in the public trust does not get pounds into crony pockets from privatization!Judt finishes with a "What Can Be Done?" chapter. In these he exhorts us to counter the "It's Socialism" lie with, no, "It's Social Democracy" - where everybody "buys" into the solution via the democratic process. The second exhortation is to stop thinking in econometric terms as that only serves those whose concern is money. We measure GDP, but do we measure and govern to life expectancy? To birth survival rates? To a Bhutanian Gross Happiness Product? We do not and therefore these are left to the money people - who couldn't care less if somebody lives or dies as long as it is not them. less

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