New Book!

Allow me to quote this awesome little book I found at random in the library the other day. It's going to be a great companion to my novel for airplane reading this weekend:

"The great unwinding of the financial sector showed that the smartest methematical minds on the planet, backed by some of the deepest pockets, had not built a sleek engine of permanent prosperity but a clown car of trades, swaps and double dares that, inevitably, fell to bits. The recession has not come from a deficit of economic knowledge, but from too much of a particular kind, a surfeit of the spirit of capitalism. The dazzle of free markets has blinded us to other ways of seeing the world. As Oscar Wilde wrote over a century ago: 'Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.' Prices have revealed themselves as fickle guides: The 2008 financial collapse came in the same year as crises in food and oil, and yet we seem unable to see or value our world except through the faulty prism of markets" (Patel 3-4).

Raj Patel goes on to talk about Greenspan's rise and fall and how he admitted he was short-sighted and wrong. It is all quote-worthy, and I only got to page 5 before the phone rang and I had to attend a committee meeting at my church.

Life is good. Life is very, very good.