Very Thoughtful Personal Opinion, Very High Value,
February 27, 2002
George Soros
I think George Soros and Robert Kaplan, as well as others that are starting to realize that the opposite of virtue is not vice but rather virtue carried to an extreme (Jim Fox said it first, at least in this era), are on to something.Although economists of great traditional standing (Robert Samuelson comes to mind) have been very quick to denigrate, even trash, the ideas of George Soros, my personal reaction, and my own reading of 225 or so books that I have reviewed for Amazon, suggests that he is right on target. Unfettered capitalism and corporate consumerism is killing us, and is part of the problem between Western secularism and Islamic fundamentalism–we don't have a model for sustainable faith-based prosperity they can buy into (I am mindful of Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong thesis).
Most recently, in The Washington Post of 24 February 2002, George Soros is quoted as saying, “We can't be successful in fighting terrorism unless we fight that other axis of evil–poverty, disease and ignorance.” Right on. Both The Future of Life and The Future of Ideas (see my reviews of those titles), and many other books now coming together in a critical mass, support basic propositions about the failure of politics, the erosion of moral contexts, and the dangers of capitalism upon public health, the environment, and the social fabric.
I would normally have rated this book with 4 stars for its lack of reference to others, but in light of the importance of the argument that George Soros makes, and the value of his own unique experiences bridging the worlds of poverty and wealth, American and Eastern European challenges and biases, I have to give this a 5–and wait to see our academic economists do better.
