I got quoted in a piece in this month's Boston Magazine from my review of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
The piece is really great, it covers my feelings about the book as well. Some of the book was fact but some just seemed delusional...
Kudos to Maureen Tkacik for writing a great piece, and really digging into his claims. Here she is talking to one of the people John mentioned in the book:
So that's it: Perkins is lying?
Long pause.
“I think that John,” Greve says, “really has convinced himself that a lot of this stuff is true.”
But her best bit references her own experiences:
My grandfather built nuclear power plants for Bechtel in Taiwan, and my dad was a diplomat in China. When I was a kid we lived in a crowded, beige former opium port called Guangzhou. My dad spent much of his time meeting provincial officials, advancing the causes of American companies like Nike and Proctor & Gamble. It was a bitch. Perhaps to get away, to detach himself from all the dilemmas created by geopolitics, my father devoted many of his vacation days to visiting shrines to those mostly altruistic pioneers of globalization, the Jesuits. On one of those trips he met a beggar child who was badly burned--deliberately burned, he realized, to elicit sympathy. Now, we had met hundreds of beggars in those years, fellow men with distended bellies and limbs the width of pencils and deformities you couldn't in your wildest dreams believe, and my dad is a big-hearted man. But never before had he felt so personally responsible, so overcome with the rottenness of the system, that he broke down sobbing.
That night after dinner, sitting with my mom alone at the ostentatious marble table the government had provided us, I heard him crying again. The thing is, he wasn't responsible, and he knew that. But my dad still cries, when you bring up that story. I'm crying right now.
Anyways, if you have access to Boston Magazine, pick up a copy.
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