I had very high expectations for this book, perhaps that's why I ended up disliking it so much. I almost want to read it again just so I can tally up all of its faults. First off, the author should have had an economist review it. For being a book about the economy, I found its treatment of economics very poor. Anyone with a different viewpoint on economics could poke car-sized holes through most of his arguments. The vast majority of his evidence for various points he tries to make is anecdotal, and towards the end he says something like "If all of this sounds anecdotal to you, that's because it is," and then going on to say that that's the best evidence he's got. Maybe that's true from the very limited point of view he's taking, but not if you take a wider look at his topics. Not that his conclusions are completely wrong, but the argument he makes for them is simplistic at best. I think the author was trying to stay away from sounding leftist or even liberal, and trying to appease the right, and in doing so watered down his material greatly. The book is more about the environment and culture than it really is about economics, but at least he had the ability to see that economics is underlying the root of our problems with those issues.

One of the parts that actually made me laugh out loud is towards the beginning when he writes, "Obviously, markets work." Yes, that is so obvious. Especially obvious to all the poor people around the world that he talks about so much. He tries to critique capitalism and at the same time praise it for how great it is. He laments that it's too global, not local enough, without realizing that it's really the inherent nature of capitalism to become big and do what it's currently doing to the world. But if only we could rein it in just a little, everything would be fine. Right. He constantly looks back to just a little bit in the past when we didn't live in such a globalized society with many of our recent technological advances, but really fails to see that we'd end up right back where we are today if we went his route of only reforming and changing things a little bit.

The long and short of it is, if you already know that the environment is in peril, that the U.S. is too individualistic (or at least likes to pretend so), and that globalization has done great harm to local communities, you can avoid wasting your time with this book.