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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Oblomov who wrote (1552)	12/25/2000 6:03:06 PM
From: tradermike_1999	Respond to of 74559

Mike, I have just finished Tom Frank's book. I have been a reader of The Baffler for 7 years or so, and have come to enjoy Frank's righteous indignation at the follies of business culture. But, founded as they are on leftist principles, his apparent prescriptions are risible. "Economic Democracy"? Does that mean that J6P gets to withdraw some money from my bank account for a nice weekend out? Or "borrow" some of my gold eagles when the economic tough love comes? The intellectual heirs of Karl Marx seem to share his confusion as to how the "late capitalist" marketplace can continue to operate despite its "internal contradictions". My leftist friends are now gleeful at what is occurring in the Nasdaq. They seem to think that the collapse results in a reduction of the concentration of economic power. This is simply not the case. The middle and lower-middle classes benefited most from the bull market, and are hurt the most by a bear market. Dr. Frank seems merely to relish the idea that the public might clamor for the socialist solution, as if that would somehow make his views "right". I just finished the piece I was writing. Will post it here. You'll see that I borrowed a lot from his book. I actually met Frank a few years ago at a bar in Charlottesville. Very funny and nice guy. Sacrastic type of humor. We talked a lot about the academic job market which is a very pessimistic thing to say the least. You could call it exploitive. People graduating with PhDs and getting paid 3-5k to teach a class so that the Universities can cut costs. Shows you why people are often better off with a union. He left that and started the Baffler magazine. Glad to see that he is getting more attention now with his One Market Under God Book - which came out at a timely time. Probably the best book of its kind to criticitze the New Economy nonsense. The Schiller book Irrational Exubarance also came out at the right time - but I don't think its that good. What you've said is the main criticism of Frank's work. He is good at being a critic but doesn't propose any solutions to what he is criticizing. Leftism and Marxism are difficult things and there aren't many true ones around. Academic leftists tend to be cultural critics(not talking about Frank here in fact he attacks them in his book - the Postmodernists) of a detestable sort. Think Frank basically wants a return to New Deal type policies under FDR.