Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm writing this review because I wish someone had warned me not to spend so much time reading this book. It has many positive reviews, but I really struggled to even finish it. I'll have to admit, the "hook" in the opening paragraphs threw me for a little loop and made me want to understand the authors answer to a simple question. The author is at a dinner party where he is introduced to a "well-appointed young woman", an activist attorney who works for an antipoverty group in London. They get into a discussion about the IMF and the author boasts that his organization, a global justice movement, "managed to almost completely destroy the IMF". The author goes on to explain the IMF and all the problems of the IMF, and the lawyer asks the author's position concerning the Third World Debt. He replies, "Oh, we wanted to abolish that too" (the IMF and the third world debt). The lawyer objects, "they borrowed the money! Surely one has to pay one's debts." Obviously the author didn't agree with this position, after all he had tried to abolish the IMF as well as the third world debt. I understood to some extent the reasoning behind the author's views and felt somewhat sympathetic, but I got the impression that the author had a lot more to say about the subject. I was right about that. He had a lot more to say. In fact he had a lot to say about things that wandered way off the subject. And he went on and on and on. While the next ten chapters demonstrated a wide breadth of knowledge about history and anthropology and history of economics, I would have to say it rambled a lot. I'll have to admit there was a lot of information I didn't already know, and a lot of theorizing and postulating about slavery, and sex slaves, and marriage customs and their relationship to money and debt. I assumed that all of this was accurate and was willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt. I figured that he had a point and that he would get to it eventually. Then I ran across a statement that took me by complete surprise. The author is discussing a concept which he calls "baseline communism", something I think we all understand. It's the way we act around our friends and family. We share things without keeping account, and extend common courtesies and support when needed. Then he says, "Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with with their laptops in each other's garages." Apple computer was actually founded by three kids, Steve Jobs (a well known democrat), Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. It was incorporated January 3, 1977. Mike Markkula provided $250,000 of seed capital and also important business expertise during the incorporation of Apple. As you can see almost every detail of the author's sentence is incorrect including the essential point of it being a form of "baseline communism". How this ever got by his editors or publishers, I don't understand. Finding this glaring error on a piece of information that could be so easily verified lead me to believe that this guy was fully capable of making up information out of thin air to support his own theories. I began fact checking anything I was suspicious about, but I found that his facts concerning history, or anthropology were reasonably accurate. And, for the first 10 chapters, he talks mostly about history and anthropology and the history of economics, but adds his own spin, conjecture, theories and postulates, which is OK with me in this type of book. After all he's trying to make a point, right? Well, I grind my way through the rest of the book. There are sections that are interesting but I find myself struggling to keep going. However, I'm determined to understand the author's position concerning the lawyer's challenge "they borrowed the money! Surely one has to pay one's debts." Finally after what feels like a death march through the "The Axial Age, The Middle Ages, and the Age of the Great Capitalist Empires, I get to the final chapter. Well let's just suffice it to say that we never get a reasoned answer to the challenge posed at the beginning of the book. Most of chapter 12 is a rant. He postulates that the US bombed Saddam Hussein because "Saddam Hussein made the bold move of singlehandedly (sic) switching from the dollar to the euro in 2000". He postulates that the Chinese are buying US Treasuries as a form of "tribute" to the US. He ends with a sub-paragraph titled: "Perhaps the World Really Does Owe You a Living", where he sarcastically says: "Cancel all student debt? But that would be unfair to all those people who struggled for years to pay back their student loans!...this argument makes about as much sense as saying it would be unfair to a mugging victim not to mug their neighbors too." I think the author completely forgets about the people that put up the money for the student loans, the taxpayers, the individuals, unions, the pension funds. These are people who eventually will be dependent on the return of the principle and interest on those loans. In the very last paragraph he proposes a "long overdue" forgiveness of debt, a "Biblical-style Jubilee: one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt", as if this would be completely victim-less, or for that matter would even have fewer victims than the existing paradigm. I'm sorry, in spite of the fact that there is a lot of good information in this book, I just can't recommend it because the author fails to provide reasoning to back up his point of view. First of all he fails to even provide the outline of a comprehensive solution. He provides history, emotional persuasion, pity perhaps, but fails miserably to demonstrate in any reasonable way that more people would be better off if we did what?...He never answers the question.