Faint Praise

The Economist takes on, in impeccable British style, Gen-Y anti-capitalist, crypto-Green anti-globalization gadfly/sex symbol Naomi Klein:

Ms Klein, by her own account, was a late developer as a social revolutionary. Growing up in a family of activists and campaigners, her teenage rebellion took the form of devotion to the shopping mall and willing enslavement to the tyranny of the logo. When her youthful idealism kicked in, its strength and durability more than made up for its delayed onset. In her 30s, Ms Klein has all the incoherence and self-righteous disgust of the alienated adolescent.

As she looks around the world, she sees nothing she likes, no redeeming features—except for “the movement”. The rule of corporations, as she sees it, is inherently repressive and exploitative of powerless citizens. Democracy is a sham. She gives capitalism no credit for the extraordinary progress seen in recent decades in reducing poverty and other measures of deprivation (notably child mortality) in the world's poor countries. She measures the growing-pains of capitalist development not against real-world alternatives but against a Disneyesque utopia in which no poor person ever loses his job or chooses to work in a multinational factory at low wages (by rich-world standards).

And only in the UK could you get:

Ms Klein's harshest critics must allow that, for an angry adolescent, she writes rather well. It takes journalistic skill of a high order to write page after page of engaging blather, so totally devoid of substance.

Read it all.

Posted by Mitch at November 18, 2002 09:33 PM