Richard A. Posner is Circuit Judge, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Among his many books are Law and Literature, Third Edition and How Judge Think (both from Harvard).
[A] compelling read...Notable for [its] high seriousness and
sophistication.--Robert Teitelman"Huffington Post" (12/23/2010)
[Posner's] bracing and intellectually admirable "A Failure of
Capitalism" demands attention.--Jonathan Kirshner"Boston Review"
(01/01/2011)
[Posner] has the rare kind of mind that is a pure pleasure to watch
in action, regardless of the subject and the argument being
made.--John Lanchester"New Yorker" (06/01/2009)
[Posner] is the quintessential U.S. economic-conservative
intellectual...So an excoriating attack by Posner on modern
financial market practices is news. "A Failure of Capitalism" is
precisely that. There are still U.S. conservatives who think the
crisis was overdone, that the policy response has been too great,
that this was merely a crisis of confidence and liquidity, and that
the banking system was not insolvent, merely illiquid. That is not
Posner's view. His judgment is that the banking system is insolvent
and the crisis that took place in 2008 transformed a recession in
the US into a depression...In his preface, Posner emphasizes that
he has written the book "in medias res", a lawyer's way of saying
"in the thick of it," with the implication that he has yet fully to
make up his mind. He has, however, offered a thought-provoking
interim analysis of what went wrong.--Warwick Lightfoot"Financial
World" (07/01/2009)
A surprising volume that explains what happened to the banking
system and economy in terms the lay reader can easily
understand...[Posner's] critique is bracing, all the more so
because it comes from a right-leaning thinker normally hostile to
the ministrations of government bureaucrats.--Paul M.
Barrett"Washington Post Book World" (05/03/2009)
Before seeking political asylum in free-market Hong Kong, consider
reading a new book that critiques what went wrong with capitalism,
written in order to save it. Judge Richard Posner's "A Failure of
Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression" is
noteworthy. As a longtime University of Chicago professor and
father of the free-market-based law-and-economics movement, Judge
Posner makes an unlikely critic of capitalism. But as author of
some 40 books and as the most frequently cited federal appeals
court jurist, he is also one of our most original and clearheaded
thinkers.--L. Gordon Crovitz"Wall Street Journal" (05/05/2009)
It comes as something of a surprise that Posner, a doyen of the
market-oriented law-and-economics movement, should deliver a
roundhouse punch to the proposition that markets are
self-correcting. It might also seem odd that a federal appellate
judge (and University of Chicago law lecturer) would be among the
first out of the gate with a comprehensive book on the financial
crisis--if, that is, the judge were any other judge. But Posner is
the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan's successor as the country's most
omnivorous and independent-minded public intellectual. By now, his
dozens of books just about fill their own wing in the Library of
Congress...Compact and bracingly lucid...By the last page, not a
single lazy generalization has survived Posner's merciless
scrutiny, not one populist cliche remains standing. "A Failure of
Capitalism" clears away whole forests of cant but leaves readers at
a loss as to where to go from here. In other words, it is only a
starting point--but an indispensable
Lively, readable, and plainspoken...Posner has an extraordinarily
sharp mind.--Robert M. Solow"New York Review of Books"
(05/14/2009)
Posner has managed to write a compelling book on the crash...The
book has numerous worthwhile insights, including a surprisingly
Keynesian analysis of the dynamics of depressions.--Robert
Kuttner"American Prospect" (05/01/2009)
Richard Posner is a phenomenon...He provides a very competent
account of the events which led to the current crisis, with an
emphasis on the political and ideological context.--John
Kay"Financial Times" (07/31/2009)
Richard Posner is one of America's most prominent and prolific
public intellectuals...With his concise, jargon-free analysis of
the current economic crisis, Posner has cast his lot with those who
believe that the "depression" (given the steep reduction in
consumption, credit and production, the term, he insists, is
appropriate) was the result "not of intrusive, heavy-handed
regulation of housing and finance, but of deregulation, hostility
to taxation and to government in general."--Glenn C.
Altschuler"Jerusalem Post" (06/19/2009)
The best book describing this malaise is Richard Posner's "A
Failure of Capitalism". The distinctiveness of his case is that he
is a prominent conservative thinker with the intellectual acuity to
argue that the crisis is not to do with the traditional enemy of
conservatism, big government, but is a consequence of decisions
taken by private firms. The ill-effects of those decisions were
worsened by deregulation of banking.--Oliver Kamm"The Times"
(12/05/2009)
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