"One Market Under God"
One
Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market
Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy
So, are you better off now than you were four years ago? Did you buy Cisco on a dip? Did you get an angel investor to fund your startup, or retire 10 years early, or otherwise live out some previously unthinkable New Economy fantasy? O.K., so the stock indexes have not had a terribly good year, but mutual fund inflows continue apace, CNBC is now most-watched cable news network, and it is difficult to have a conversation about any issue without someone offering up the ideal ''market solution.'' Meanwhile, the most important political debate seems to be who gets credit for our recent prosperity and who knows best how to keep it going.
This, in other words, is a very, very lonely time in which to attempt a flat-out assault on market culture. Thomas Frank seems well aware of this state of affairs, but he is obviously undaunted. ''One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy'' is a 350-page exercise in skepticism that possesses all the subtlety of a raised middle finger. What he offers is an alternative history of the great bull market, and especially of the last four years. In particular he wants to make the connection — as Ronald Reagan did by asking voters in 1980 if they felt better off or not — between politics and personal finance.
Stage 1 in Frank's history is the so-called culture war, in which the right, starting with Richard Nixon in 1968, redefined the elite-versus-populist division: The masses were no longer set against the corporate chieftains, but instead were encouraged to see intellectuals, academics and liberals in general as their great cultural foe. This enabled corporate America to re-enter the picture as what Frank calls ''market populists,'' insisting that ''by its very nature the market was democratic, perfectly expressing the popular will through the machinery of supply and demand, poll and focus group, superstore and Internet.'' Bill Clinton shook hands with Newt Gingrich, ''the signal that the historical opponent to the business party was no longer interested in opposing.'' And from there it was a short ride to the notion that the ability to trade stocks online was a form of empowerment, and anyone who says otherwise is a pointy-headed liberal elitist — who would probably make a bad entrepreneur in any case.
Frank, who edits The Baffler, attacks this market-populist narrative in the style of a literary theorist, poring over the words and images of, among others, George Gilder, Lester Thurow, Thomas Friedman, Walter Wriston, Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, The Motley Fool, online brokerage advertising, Wired magazine and business and personal finance magazines generally. At times his eye is sharp, as when he notes the willingness of some ''corporate rebels'' to compare themselves to the Khmer Rouge, or describes an ad in which I.B.M. ''passes the hot potato of wowlessness'' to clueless Japanese organization men. One of his best points is to identify inevitability as a ''sort of logical atom bomb'' of market populists, who love to flaunt their iron laws and paradigms. ''The market will give you a voice, empower you to do whatever you want to do,'' Frank summarizes, ''and if you have any doubts about that, then the market will crush you and everything you've ever known.''
As it happens, I am extremely familiar with some of the material that so ticks Frank off, having worked as an editor at SmartMoney, Fortune and Money during the period that is the main time frame for his scorn. He gives a few lopsided interpretations of this or that article or book, but he doesn't actually do anything outside the bounds of the usual mischief of rhetoric. Maybe more to the point, my familiarity actually makes me more sympathetic to his core argument, not less so. I think Frank is right to counter the notion that buying stocks is a subversive act that is somehow equal to the spirit of punk rock or the civil rights crusade. Buying stocks is a way to increase your personal net worth. Perhaps doing so will result in some greater personal freedom; that does not make it an act of social rebellion.
That said, the book is pretty uneven. There is a lot of repetition and a fair amount of tedium; a long chapter on academia is particularly grueling. Because Frank is more of a critic than a reporter, some of his offhand observations are maddeningly vague. For instance, he makes a short and unconvincing argument that in general American corporate managers have been rewarded ''in proportion to the amount of power and security that workers lost,'' and elsewhere he matter-of-factly attributes the whole of Jack Welch's success at General Electric to layoffs. You can make a case about this, but it would take more than the few sentences that Frank offers.
Finally, there is something about Frank's idea of a kind of revolution from above that I find unconvincing, partly because I think it lets Main Street off the hook a little too easily. He trumpets the multiple by which Welch's income exceeds that of a typical worker, and the latest statistics about increasing wealth inequality, as if these were covered-up facts that will surely galvanize the reader. But will they? They haven't up to now.
At one point Frank discusses the proposition that Peter Lynch deserves middle-class hero status because people stop him on the street to thank him for running the popular Fidelity Magellan Fund so well that it allowed them to accumulate a bigger retirement nest egg, or to pay for their kid's tuition, or to build an addition to their home. Frank of course sees no heroism in this, and counters that ''each of these necessities — pensions, shelter, college — were things Americans had once sought to ensure through union activity or government intervention, things that Americans once believed were theirs simply by virtue of being citizens, things that could and should be available to everyone in a democratic society.''
Yes, except that the key here is that no one thanks Lynch for ''shelter,'' they thank him for the extra cash to add a rumpus room. I agree with Frank that this is a sad definition of heroism. It seems that a large and important segment of the American public has simply decided that it is less necessary for society to provide a floor beneath which no one can sink than it is to make sure that there is absolutely no ceiling limiting how high one might fly. But I don't think that these citizen shareholders have come to this view because of anything Peter Lynch or George Gilder said. I think they came to it because they are better off now than they were four years ago.
A similar version of this appeared in the November 19, 2000, issue of The New York Times Book Review.
