Cav's Place

At least I just borrowed this from the Library, but I still feel cheated, expecting an actual book and getting a collection of essays already published over a span of several years, which isn’t mentioned anywhere on the cover, so you need to get quite a number of pages into the introduction to find out. And those essays are completely unchanged, resulting in content that’s more outdated and far shallower than you’d expect the book to be, plus that plenty of ideas are simply repeated time and time again. Admittedly, this also makes the book particularly easy to read.
The only sections that are written specifically for this book are the introductions for each part, and while they mostly just provide a little context for the essays, some are more notable and interesting, such as the one for part one and the parts about trade agreements and intellectual property from the one for part six. And it was pleasing to see trade agreements and intellectual property being approached in such a critical manner in itself. And I must definitely say the same about describing how capitalism currently works as privatizing the profits while socializing or nationalizing the losses, externalizing the costs, and freeloading on public services and infrastructure and state-supported research. And I could keep nodding along to plenty of other ideas.
The fact that the vast majority of the book is focused on the United States did make me feel rather disconnected, and the essays that are strictly about the 2008 crisis were even worse from that point of view. But, besides that, the problem is that the author remains such a staunch supporter of capitalism, just aiming to limit its worst excesses, when the system itself is the problem and it needs to be replaced with something different. In addition, he continues to push for growth and full employment, states that the major problem is the lack of demand, disagrees with prioritizing fighting inflation and supports the concept of people, businesses and states continuing to live on credit in itself, all of which I firmly oppose.