Amazon.com Review
After nearly a decade of bull markets, Americans have come to equate free markets with democracy. Never one for mincing words, social critic Thomas Frank, editor of The Baffler and author of The Conquest of Cool, challenges this myth. With his acerbic wit and contempt for sophistry, he declares the New Economy a fraud. Frank scours business literature, management theory, and marketing and advertising to expose the elaborate fantasies that have inoculated business against opposition. This public relations campaign joins an almost mystical belief in markets, a contempt for government in any form, and an "ecstatic" confusion of markets with democracy. Frank traces the roots of this movement from the 1920s, and sees its culmination in market populism as a fusion of the rebellious '60s with the greedy '80s. The overarching irony is the swapping of roles--suddenly Wall Street is no longer full of stodgy moneygrubbers, but cool entrepreneurs "leaping on their trampolines, typing out a few last lines on the laptop before paragliding, riding their bicycles to work, listening to Steppenwolf while they traded." Meanwhile, "Americans traded their long tradition of electoral democracy for the democracy of the supermarket, where all brands are created equal and endowed by their creators with all sorts of extremeness and diversity." Frank's close reading of the salesmen of market populism nails such financial gurus as George Gilder, Joseph Nocera, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas Friedman. Their writings, he contends, have served to make "the world safe for billionaires" by winning the cultural and political battle--legitimizing the corporate culture and its demands for privatization, deregulation, and non-interference. Frank's incisive prose verges on brilliant at times, though his yen for repetition can be exasperating. In either case, his boisterous reminder that markets are fundamentally not democracies is worth repeating as the level of wealth polarization in America reaches heights not seen since the 1920s. --Lesley Reed
From Publishers Weekly
An incisive and incendiary survey of today's cultural, political and economic landscape, social critic Frank's latest salvo conclude, that the New Economy is a fraud, management literature and theory are nothing but self-serving forms of public relations, and that, despite its self-congratulatory commercials, business is not cool. During the recent economic boom, he argues, our nation's hallowed tradition of political populism has morphed into market populism, a reverence for financial success in the marketplace as the ultimate authority of all that is good and true. Frank, founding editor of the Baffler magazine and author of The Conquest of Cool, thinks he knows who is to blame and he names names. The list is long and makes irresistible reading. Distilling vast research into highly readable volleys, he backs up his rage against the received orthodoxies of the New Economy, globalization and free markets with hard facts. He shows the resemblance between the banking crisis of the 1930s and present banking practices and demonstrates that income inequality is on the rise with the richest 10% controlling over 70% of the nation's wealth. Heaping contempt on those he views as old-fashioned hucksters turned out in hipsters' clothing, he nominates such self-proclaimed pundits as George Gilder, the Motley Fools, best-selling author Spencer Johnson and the Body Shop's Anita Roddick to his personal Hall of Shame. A fierce and informed advocate for core American political values, Frank offers a critique of the way business has taken over American society that is especially resonant in this election year. (Nov. 1)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Frank is the author of The Conquest of Cool (1997), a critical look at "counterculture" and the evolution of "hip consumerism." He also edits the Baffler, a Chicago-based quarterly that proclaims itself "the journal that blunts the cutting edge." Frank considers how it came to be that business can now present itself as "merely a more perfect version of democracy" and how that presumption came to be almost universally accepted. Frank charges there are many who bear responsibility for promulgating and perpetuating what he sees as a ruse. He finds culprits among the writers of management literature, in advertising, in academia's cultural-studies programs, and in the press. He cites as bogus the arguments in support of free trade and the notion that we are all better off because we all now have stock portfolios. In his encyclopedic survey of the current economic, social, and cultural landscape, Frank sees targets everywhere--Tom Peters, Peter Lynch, George Gilder, the Beardstown Ladies, and even Charles Kuralt! Despite the righteous posturing, Frank's juicy cynicism is often a delight. David Rouse
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Praise for One Market Under God:
"Tom Frank is a brilliant pain in the ass. While you may not agree with all he says herein (I threw the book across the room eleven times), his style is always engaging and very frequently funny, and his message-his violent and merciless destruction of the myths of the New Economy-blasts through our willing ignorance and thus must be heard."
-Dave Eggers
"Tom Frank's powerful, incisive, and witty critique of the smug gasbag rhetoric of New Economy gurus like Tom Peters is a work worthy of Mencken and Dwight Macdonald. He doesn't pontificate, he investigates, and his investigation of the link between ad agency 'intellectuals' and 'cult studs' academics, for instance, is a comic tour de force."
-Ron Rosenbaum
"Thomas Frank has cracked the market wide open, laying bare the perversion of reality and abuse of language that corporations, stockbrokers, and much of the academy use to hold the nation in thrall. Read this book. Find out what ails us."
-Earl Shorris
"One Market Under God does for the latter-day market worshippers, cyber-hustlers, and New Economy bubble-blowers what Sinclair Lewis did for the Babbitts and Zenith Chambers of Commerce of the Roaring Twenties."
-Kevin Phillips
"At last, a brave, witty dissent from the hype and cant of the so-called New Economy! Thomas Frank's One Market Under God is an astonishingly well-written argument on behalf of American workers who have seen their jobs disappear, their benefits cut, and their incomes reduced in the name of the great global marketplace... One Market Under God tells us what we won't read in our glossy personal finance magazines, or hear on our all-business channels: our economic elites finally are getting their revenge for the New Deal, and have replaced our sense of community with the values of one market, under God."
-Terry Golway
"How is it that our gilded age permitted the shining ideal of the yeoman farmer to be replaced by the grubby reality of the day trader? Thomas Frank is the first historian to try to tell the hard story of how the metaphor of the marketplace has vanquished every domain of modernity."
-Jack Hitt
"This great book is like a roaring new version of Thomas Carlyle, with a dash of Tom Wolfe: only the bonfire here is on a much higher flame. As Frank shows, American business has been stripping us of our language in a way that makes Cortés and the conquistadores look like crude amateurs. His new book is an exciting dare to all of us to take the language back."
-Thomas Geoghegan
From the Inside Flap
rket Under God is a cogent, fiercely entertaining, and often scathing assault on the institutions and pretensions of the new capitalist order and the tyranny of the almighty market.
At no other moment in American history have the values of business and the corporation been more nakedly and arrogantly in the ascendant. In One Market Under God, social critic Thomas Frank examines the morphing of the language of American democracy into the cant and jargon of the marketplace. Combining popular intellectual history with a survey of recent business culture, Frank traces an idea he calls "market populism"-the notion that markets are, in some transcendent way, identifiable with democracy and the will of the people. The belief that any criticism of things as they are is elitist can be seen in management literature, where downsizing and ceaseless, chaotic change are celebrated as victories for democracy; in advertising, where an endless array of brands seek to position
From the Back Cover
Praise for One Market Under God:
"Tom Frank is a brilliant pain in the ass. While you may not agree with all he says herein (I threw the book across the room eleven times), his style is always engaging and very frequently funny, and his message-his violent and merciless destruction of the myths of the New Economy-blasts through our willing ignorance and thus must be heard."
-Dave Eggers
"Tom Frank's powerful, incisive, and witty critique of the smug gasbag rhetoric of New Economy gurus like Tom Peters is a work worthy of Mencken and Dwight Macdonald. He doesn't pontificate, he investigates, and his investigation of the link between ad agency 'intellectuals' and 'cult studs' academics, for instance, is a comic tour de force."
-Ron Rosenbaum
"Thomas Frank has cracked the market wide open, laying bare the perversion of reality and abuse of language that corporations, stockbrokers, and much of the academy use to hold the nation in thrall. Read this book. Find out what ails us."
-Earl Shorris
"One Market Under God does for the latter-day market worshippers, cyber-hustlers, and New Economy bubble-blowers what Sinclair Lewis did for the Babbitts and Zenith Chambers of Commerce of the Roaring Twenties."
-Kevin Phillips
"At last, a brave, witty dissent from the hype and cant of the so-called New Economy! Thomas Frank's One Market Under God is an astonishingly well-written argument on behalf of American workers who have seen their jobs disappear, their benefits cut, and their incomes reduced in the name of the great global marketplace... One Market Under God tells us what we won't read in our glossy personal finance magazines, or hear on our all-business channels: our economic elites finally are getting their revenge for the New Deal, and have replaced our sense of community with the values of one market, under God."
-Terry Golway
"How is it that our gilded age permitted the shining ideal of the yeoman farmer to be replaced by the grubby reality of the day trader? Thomas Frank is the first historian to try to tell the hard story of how the metaphor of the marketplace has vanquished every domain of modernity."
-Jack Hitt
"This great book is like a roaring new version of Thomas Carlyle, with a dash of Tom Wolfe: only the bonfire here is on a much higher flame. As Frank shows, American business has been stripping us of our language in a way that makes Cortés and the conquistadores look like crude amateurs. His new book is an exciting dare to all of us to take the language back."
-Thomas Geoghegan
About the Author
Thomas Frank is a founding editor of The Baffler, a magazine of cultural criticism. He holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Chicago and is the author of The Conquest of Cool and coeditor of Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler. He has regularly been quoted by, appeared on, or written for National Public Radio, ABC's World News Tonight, The Wall Street Journal, Harper's, The Nation, and many other outlets.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Getting to Yes
The Architecture of a New Consensus
American industry--the whole capitalist system--lives in the shadow of a volcano. That volcano is public opinion. It is in eruption. Within an incredibly short time it will destroy business or it will save it. --PR man Carl Byoir, 19381
I am a revolutionary, as you may know.
--John S. Reed, CEO of Citicorp, 1992
Let Us Build Us a Bill Gates
It was the age of the focus group, of the vox populi transformed into flesh, descended to earth and holding forth majestically in poll results, in town hall meetings, in brand loyalty demographics, in e-mail bulletin boards, in website hits, in browser traffic. The people's voice was heard at last, their verdict printed in a full-color chart on page one. The CEO was down from his boardroom and taking questions at the empowerment seminar; the senator was pointing out a family farmer right there in the audience; the first lady was on a "listening tour," the anchorman was keeping an anxious eye on the chat-room. The president himself was "putting people first"; was getting down at a "people's inaugural"; was honoring our values at "town meetings"; was wandering among us in a humble tour bus; was proving his affection for us with heroic feats of consumption--an endless succession of Big Macs, apple pies entire.
For all that, the formalities of democracy seemed to hold little charm for We the People in the 1990s. Election turnouts dwindled through the decade, hitting another humiliating new low every couple of years. Any cynic could tell you the reason why: Politics had once again become a sport of kings, with "soft money" and corporate contributions, spun into the pure gold of TV advertising, purchasing results for the billionaires' favorites as effectively as had the simple payoffs of the age of boodle. For those who could show the money, to use one of the era's favorite expressions, there were vacancies in the Lincoln Bedroom, coffee klatches with the commander-in-chief, special subsidies of their very own. We voted less and less, and the much-discussed price tags of electoral victory soared like the NASDAQ.
Maybe the amounts our corporate friends were spending to court us should have been a source of national pride; maybe those massive sums constituted a sort of democratic triumph all by themselves. Certainly everything else that money touched in the nineties shined with a kind of populist glow. In the eighties, maybe, money had been an evil thing, a tool of demonic coke-snorting vanity, of hostile takeovers and S&L ripoffs. But something fundamental had changed since then, we were told: Our billionaires were no longer slave-driving martinets or pump-and-dump Wall Street manipulators. They were people's plutocrats, doing without tie and suit, chatting easily with the rank-and-file, building the new superstore just for us, seeing to it that the customer was served, wearing name tags on their work-shirts, pushing the stock prices up benevolently this time, making sure we all got to share in the profit-taking and that even the hindest hindmost got out with his or her percentage intact. These billionaires were autographing workers' hardhats out at the new plant in Coffeyville; they were stepping right up to the podium and reciting Beatles lyrics for the cameras; they were giddy with excitement; they were even allowing all people everywhere to enjoy life with them via their greatest gift of all--the World Wide Web. Maybe what our greatest popular social theorist, George Gilder, had said about them all those years ago was finally true: "It is the entrepreneurs who know the rules of the world and the laws of God."
Or maybe Gilder didn't go far enough. Stay tuned for a while longer and you would see the populist entrepreneurs portrayed as something not far removed from the Almighty Himself. In a 1998 commercial for IBM's Lotus division that danced across TV screens to the tune of REM's Nietzschean anthem, "I Am Superman," great throngs of humanity were shown going nobly about their business while a tiny caption asked, "Who is everywhere?" In the response, IBM identified itself both with the great People and the name of God as revealed to Moses: The words "I Am" scrawled roughly on a piece of cardboard and held aloft from amid the madding crowd. The questions continued, running down the list from omnipresence to omniscience and omnipotence--"Who is aware?," "Who is powerful?"--while the hallowed scenes of entrepreneurial achievement pulsated by: an American business district, a Chinese garment factory, a microchip assembly room, and, finally, the seat of divine judgment itself, the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. "I can do anything," sang a winsome computer voice.
If there was something breathtaking about the presumption of this particular bit of corporate autodeification, this conflation of God, IBM, and the People, there was also something remarkably normal about it. Americans had already made best-sellers of books like God Wants You to be Rich and Jesus, CEO. The paintings of Thomas Kincade, the decade's greatest master of kitsch (and a man who actually trademarked a description of himself--"painter of light"), freely mixed heavy-handed religious symbolism with the accoutrements of great wealth, plunking Bible references down alongside glowing mansions and colorful gazebos. "The Market's Will Be Done" was the title Tom Peters, guru of gurus, chose for a chapter of his best-selling 1992 management book, while techno-ecstatic Kevin Kelly, whose 1994 book, Out of Control, was a sustained effort to confuse divinity with technology, referred quite confidently to a list of New Economy pointers he had come up with as "The Nine Laws of God." The heavens seemed even closer as the decade progressed and the surly bonds of the "Old Economy" slipped away. The publisher of Fast Company, a magazine dealing in the apotheosis of the new breed of corporate leaders, described his publication in 1999 as "a religion"; one Morgan Stanley analyst was routinely referred to in print as "the Internet Goddess" (her "embrace" of a company was described by one magazine as "a laying on of hands"); a much-discussed online operation matched "angel" investors with thankful startups in a cyber-space called "Heaven"; ads for the GoTo search engine showed Muslims at prayer and suggested that such a "loyal following" could be yours as well were you to patronize their product; and advertisements for Ericsson cellphones insisted that the product conferred powers of omnipresence: "You Are Everywhere."
