Emily Eakin's "On the Dark Side of Democracy" in this morning's Times is an excellent survey of the markets-and-democracy issue; Eakin did a good job of touching all the right intellectual bases, especially Amy Chua. I wrote just for myself a review of World on Fire in mid-2003, after hearing Chua speak at the law school, but I didn't try to publish it because I kept thinking of the advice from my philosophy professor, Gresham Riley, who said, "Don't conduct your philosophical education in public!" I know so little about this area that I thought I should keep quiet. I didn't agree with the view that, according to Eakin, is expressed by Thomas Carothers, that Chua has set-up a straw man because we're not forcing democracy on other countries. Her point, I think, is almost more that we're forcing wide-open markets on other countries, without recognizing that, in our own case, we have gradually developed restrictions and social nets around our markets.
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