The cover is spare, the title centre-boxed in a subtle reprise to No Logo, and it is all bound together with a plug by Noam Chomsky. That’s some savvy marketing, designed to appeal to anti-globalisers and bobos alike. Yessir, capitalism works. It co-opts and it commodifies. Even ideas are not immune. It is the policy prescription and its ‘spin’ that are sold. Thinktanks, whose business it is to peddle ideas, are constantly mired in the contradiction between clear-eyed analysis, the basis of their credibility, and advocacy, the basis of their influence. In Growth Fetish, the balance weighs too heavily towards advocacy and the reader is left feeling slightly conned, much like Clive Hamilton reckons we feel each time we depart from the shopping mall.
Growth Fetish by Clive Hamilton
Allen & Unwin, $24.95pb, 279pp
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