by Paul Seabright

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE. The rise of disaster capitalism. By Naomi Klein. 559pp.

Allen Lane The Penguin Press. Pounds 25. - 978 0 7139 9899 3. US: Metropolitan Books. $28. - 978 0 8050 7983 8.

Under the sprawling surface of Naomi Klein's noisily enraged new book, two interesting ideas are diffidently signalling to be let out. Both concern a tendency for advanced capitalist economies to spawn crises, and for once neither lays the blame particularly at the door of financial institutions, which is unusual in these financially fixated days.

The first is the idea that since many of the reforms favoured by economic conservatives - privatization, deregulation and fiscal retrenchment, for instance - are difficult to sell to democratic electorates in normal times, those who stand to benefit from such reforms have an interest in provoking the arrival of abnormal times. Crises - military, economic, or political - do not just happen through bad luck but can be made more or less likely through the conscious choice of strategies of risk management. Economic conservatives, Klein believes, choose policies that make crises more likely to happen, because they know they will then profit from the enhanced marketability of their ideology.

The second idea concerns more specifically the post-September 11 world of foreign policymaking in the United States. Klein claims that enough individuals with a personal financial interest in activities and companies that profit from military disaster have moved into positions of influence to give US policymaking a dangerously risk- loving tilt. Like the first, this claim is important and may even be true. It also makes a welcome change from the widespread tendency on the Centre Left to blame the catastrophe of the Iraq adventure on simple stupidity in Washington, and helps to sketch an account of its origins in terms of deliberate strategies of the main actors involved - strategies that, whether or not they provoke disaster deliberately, certainly do too little to avoid it.

The Shock Doctrine could have been a great book if it had concentrated on carefully researching and arguing the case for these two interesting claims.

But Naomi Klein has bigger fish to fry, and a whole public of readers eager for a repeat of the bestselling moral fervour of her earlier book No Logo (2000) - eager, indeed, for an even bigger and more extravagant thrill. Her target is "free market ideology", specifically that popularized by the Chicago School of economists, whom she holds responsible for dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s and 80s, the invasion of Iraq, the evils and follies committed by the CIA and, indeed, most of the other ills of the world that you might name, including authoritarianism in China, the spread of AIDS in South Africa, the Israeli-Palestinian problem and the use of torture.

In case you think this might be attributing too many consequences to so small a list of villains, it soon becomes clear that free- market ideologues, though genuflecting to Chicago, include virtually anyone who has expressed any doubts about central planning, state ownership, or any aspect of the regulation of modern economies. This no doubt adds vigour to the polemic, but it makes this book about as useful a guide to modern economics as a book on the state of contemporary religion written by an atheist for whom there is no real difference between Catholics, Quakers and Bible Belt fundamentalists.

Sixty pages of footnotes do not add up to rigorous and careful research. Klein appears to believe that "Chile in the seventies, China in the late eighties, Russia in the nineties and the US after September 11, 2001" all had essentially the same economic policy. She writes that the Southern Cone of Latin America is the place "where contemporary capitalism was born". She thinks that Gorbachev's reforms of the Soviet Union were going swimmingly until he caved in to IMF pressure in 1991, which makes it inexplicable why he should have been vulnerable to IMF pressure in the first place. She ignores the contribution of economic liberalization to China's astonishing growth in the past three decades, contenting herself with a sneer about China's becoming "the sweatshop of the world". The recent experiences of India, a democracy that has moved towards liberalization of its economy without massive crises, are not mentioned. More people have escaped malnutrition through the economic reforms of these two countries in the past couple of decades than through any previous economic programmes in history, which makes the omission a large one.

Cherry-picking the evidence is particularly important for Klein's favoured strategy of guilt by association, when she implies, for instance, that since many torturers have been keen on free markets, free-market ideology leads intrinsically to the use of torture. It is not clear what, on this theory, explains the use of torture by Communist or otherwise anti-capitalist governments. Since she never mentions it, she may not be aware that it has ever happened.

Klein is not shy of moralizing. Amnesty International comes in for scorn for concentrating on torture in its 1976 report on Argentina and failing to see that the real problem was capitalism. Nelson Mandela incurs her contempt for not having chosen to implement in its entirety an ANC wish list of reforms from the 1950s that even Robert Mugabe might have considered optimistic for the 1990s (Klein is the first person I have read in a while who can write without irony of "printing money" as a general solution to a government's resource constraints). "Chicago School ideology" is specifically named as responsible for the casualties of the wars in Chechnya and gang rapes of Chinese women in Indonesia in 1997. She cannot quite pin the 2004 Asian tsunami on the Chicago School economists, but she implies that they must have greeted it with a round of applause. This is not, it should be understood, a book for those who like nuance.

There are moments of unintentional black comedy when, on her tour of the world's hot spots, Klein jets in to Baghdad to tell the inhabitants that their real problem is capitalism and finds, as the bombs explode around her, most of her interlocutors wishing they had a little more capitalism and a little less civil war. For a few seconds of sheer fright it seems as though Klein is wobbling, and may even be tempted to agree with them, but self-control reasserts itself and she comes up with the explanation that has eluded everyone else. The state of Iraq today, far from owing anything to misjudgement, was precisely intended by the free-market ideologues all along: "it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the ideology that gave it birth . . . .

The 'fiasco' of Iraq is one created by a careful and faithful application of unrestrained Chicago School ideology". Whatever you may think of the terms "careful" and "faithful" in this account, you have to admire her chutzpah.

There are some real things to like in this book. Although none of what she writes about the CIA will be new to those who know A Question of Torture: CIA interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror (2006) by Alfred McCoy or Legacy of Ashes: The history of the CIA (2007) by Tim Weiner, Klein writes well and movingly of some of its victims. She interviews a woman in a retirement home in Montreal who was subjected to the notorious brainwashing experiments of the 1950s. Klein has also, as a journalist, made original contributions to our knowledge of large conflicts of interest between the public responsibilities of individuals such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and James Baker and their private business interests. Her ideas about the vulnerability of modern economic management to disasters are important and may even be correct. And she is right that some terrible things have been done by ideologues in the name of economic liberalization, though it doesn't help in understanding why this has happened to portray every technocrat as a mustachioed villain.

At her best, Naomi Klein can touch a nerve, shock, disturb. But at times her technique amounts to little more than the apparently shocked revelation that the world contains some very bad people and that some of these very bad people are also, and not coincidentally, very rich. This may not be a matter of misjudgement on her part. She wrote shrewdly in No Logo about the way in which corporations could manipulate the gullibility of their customers to sell more products. She was especially sharp about the public's vulnerability to high sounding appeals to values. She tracked the way in which brands had moved on from representing mere product quality to denoting courage, integrity, an entire approach to life. Nowadays Naomi Klein's business is selling books, and she uses morality as a branding tool with a deft glibness that many corporate executives must envy. She has learned her trade well.