Quiggin, J.(2001)Review of Thomas Frank's 'One Market Under God', Secker & Warburg.,,BOSS (Financial Review) 2(3),p. 64

A little while ago, one Jonathan Aspatore achieved an unenviable moment of fame, by publishing, in 2001, a book extolling the merits of dotcom startups. Clearly, this was an idea whose time had passed.

Reading One Market Under God one has exactly the opposite impression. Frank surveys the absurdities that dominated American thinking in the 1990s with an ironic distance that calls to mind, say, Gibbon on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. It is surprising that such a book could be published as early as 2001, and startling to realise that most of it was written while the great bubble was still in progress.

As the title suggests, Frank begins with a survey of the way in which 'the market' has become seen as the only true representative of society, replacing nations and governments, and ultimately laying claim to a divine mandate. Writing from a left-labor background, Frank sees the "shareholder democracy' of the 1990s as a spurious substitute for the economic democracy of the New Deal. He continually reminds the reader of the side of the story forgotten amid the euphoria of stock options for all -- the wealth accruing to the already wealthy, and the downsizing, outsourcing, casualisation and layoffs that beset lower-income workers for all but the last couple of years of the boom.

Frank excoriates the management theory literature, with the exception of Micklethwait and Wooldridge's The Witchdoctors (the title is self-explanatory). Going beyond the view that management gurus are charlatans inventing new fads to sell more books, Frank argues that the literature as a whole serves as a PR exercise to legitimate management, independent of any particular management theory.

The most interesting part of Frank's story relates to the way in which the entrepreneurs of the Internet boom appropriated the rhetoric of the Vietnam-era left, to the extent that venture capitalists refer to themselves as VC and the employees of Internet firms call themselves 'dotcommunists'. Simultaneously claiming victory in the cold war, they denounced both governments and Old Economy corporations as little better than Soviet commissars. In this story, the entrepreneurs stand for the liberation, not of the workers, but of 'new money'.

A cameo appearance is made by the postmodernists, whose alleged drive to destroy Western civilisation formed the basis of numerous denunciations of 'political correctness' in the 1990s. The postmodernist beliefs that all truth is relative, and that 'there is nothing outside the text' find their natural 1990s expression in work for the burgeoning advertising industry. The tools of critical theory and radical anthropology are pressed into service in the creation of a mythical reality for, say, a brand of toothpaste. The ultimate outcome of this radical theorising is the view that, not only nations, but individuals are, ultimately, brands, and that most are in dire need or rebranding.

An interesting question that arises on reading this book is why there has been no similar development in Australia. Although we have had an expansion as long and strong as that of the United States, the stockmarket has been far more restrained and the popular mood has range from sullen acquiescence in globalisation and marketisation to vindictive outbursts like the One Nation eruption. The answer, I suspect is that we are a decade ahead of the United States. The cult of the entrepreneur and 'the markets', the support for insurgent new money against staid old money, the package of cultural progressivism, economic liberalism and historical inevitability -- all of these were the stock-in-trade of Paul Keating in the 1980s. For most Australians, the 'recession we had to have' was the end of optimistic dreams about free-market reform. The United States, it seems, is about to experience its own version of the same awakening.

Professor John Quiggin is an Australian Research Council Senior Fellow based at the Australian National University and Queensland University of Technology.