mindbat reviewed Capitalism, Alone by Branko Milanovic
Interesting Ideas Built on Shaky Foundations
2 stars
Had high hopes for this one. It was pitched as (finally) confronting the fact that countries like China, Vietnam, etc aren't truly communist anymore, so much as authoritarian regimes over fully capitalist economies.
And it does, to some extent. The book's most interesting section is Chapter 3, where the author lays out their (to me, novel) theory of how communism served the same role in developing countries as the bourgeois revolutions in others, forming the basis for a later conversion to what they call ""political capitalism.""
Unfortunately, the author is still working under all the old disproved ideas of classical economics, such as that humans are rational (haha, nope) and that society has always been organized around markets and money (nope again). As a result, anytime they stray from a descriptive mode (backed by evidence) to an anthropological one, they rapidly pile error on top of error.