So, What Are You Freakin' Well Reading Now?

Raj Patel's The Value of Nothing:Why Everything Costs So Much More Than We Think (2009) 

This is a primer on the history of economic thought as well as a revelation about the hidden environmental and social costs of everything in our market driven world...the true cost of that hamburger may approach $200. This reader was reminded that the labour theory of value more closely resembles the true cost of things, while learning that Adam Smith's idea of value was distorted by those who required a single, neat interpretation. Just as the "invisible hand" - really Smith's explanation for the way in which merchants/manufacturers buying from each other locally, gave a "hand up" to local industry - was mystified by the market economists who followed.

Patel's work is dependent on economic history, but he uses it to ask the big political questions of today, like a section on "Whence the Countermovement?":  "Governments don't float above market society - they're embedded in it, and the recent economic crisis demonstrated this amply. In one international survey, 63 per cent of people thought that their governments were run in the service of 'big interests' as opposed to the 30 per cent who thopught governments served the will of the people. In almost every country, those polled wanted their governments to behave in ways that were more responsive to the people. An international survey of more than 29,000 people undertaken by the BBC relealed that two out of three respondents said there there was a need to transform the internaional  and domestic economic systems. The world is ready for change.

"But here's the darker part of the story. The people under those governments, you and me, are also part of the market society. There is no position from which, untainted by the world around it, some everlasting truth can guide us to a brighter future...There can be 'community failure' just as there is market failure, in which minorities risk persecution or worse. The recent rise of far-right parties around the world - from India to Europe to the United States - can also be understood as the second part of a double movement. In the United States, Louis R.Andrews, chair of the National Policy Institute - an advocay group for white people - hoped to see 'the Republican Party destroyed, so it can be reborn as a party representing the interests of white people, and not entrenched corporate elites. Which, says Andrews, is why he voted for Obama."

I freakin' well read Freakonomics last week and am now reading Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb.

I'm re-reading E.P Thompson's, The Making of the English Working Class. I didn't finish the whole book last time around.  It's about 1,000 pages and I'm 1/4 through it. I'm also reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind which is rather more difficult. Heh.

Number 1 ladies detective agency,  a series. Anyone else read these?

Motorcycles and Sweetgrass by Drew Hayden Taylor.   A light-hearted take on life on an Ontario Res (Curve Lake, the author's starting point), it gives the reader a look at today's understanding of the Trickster in aboriginal lore...and Hayden thanks Thomas King (among others) for helping him to understand the central figure in First Nations' mythology. Taylor, noted for his humour as a playwright, brings a very humourous "spirit" to the pages of his newest novel.  He's also been appreciated for his non-fiction in works such as "Me Sexy". His scriptwriting goes back to The Beachcombers and North of 60. 

The reader also gets an account of what residential schooling meant to the Ojibway of central Ontario...the humour there is strained.

Continued here