Long Overdue Book Review: The Great Unraveling
This book review is long overdue, considering I finished the book several days ago. But then I got mired in my next book (it’s postmodern French philosophy, thus the mired) and never got around to writing the review.
In any case, Paul Krugman’s The Great Unraveling can hardly be called a book. It’s much more a collection of his op-ed pieces for the New York Times over (mostly) the past 3-4 years, with some snippets back to times as early as 1996/7. For some reason I didn’t get this impression when I was shopping for this book on Amazon.com, and thus it was sort of a disappointment. Not to say that reading the columns wasn’t agreeable or interesting, it’s just that I was expecting coherent book-like thought, not 2-3 page columns with snippets of information.
Krugman is an economist by trade, and most of his columns contain a bent towards looking at the world through the prism of economics. I have no complaint with this. The columns, individually, were interesting. Perhaps this book simply didn’t speak to me as a book — the column format made it a choppy two-sitting read (it’s 400 pages long, so maybe I read it wrong by going start-to-finish in a serial fashion) that didn’t really present a coherent thesis. There were lots of little interesting gems, which I could link you to if you or I had access to NYT’s archives. Essentially the points could be distilled down to some union of the following: Bush’s economic policy (or lack thereof) is bad for the economy, The US is rushing into war, Cheney’s energy task force is clouded in secrecy (ironically this is the news now), this Administration is doing Bad Things and so on so forth. There were few positive points to note, with only the sometime suggestion for how things might be better done. It’s easy to criticize, and much harder to provide concrete advice on how to actually go about fixing problems. All in all, I’d give the book 3 out of 5 stars, but I’ll continue to read Krugman in the NYT, though admittedly his perspective is usually left of mine (though at times, I was in steadfat agreement).