Let’s just say that George Soros has a wife. She is pure and admirable; she gives some rhyme to the cold hard reason of the world he’s seen. As a philanthropist, Soros plays the doting husband donating over a billion dollars towards her wishes. He honors and obeys that wife — the Open Society, a civil system based on the philosophy of Karl Popper.
But Soros also has a mistress: powerful, free and seductive; clever but temperamental. She is willing to throw aside the cares of a million men to please just one. Dancing off while he sleeps, donning silken scarves and castanets, she shimmying through the dense heat of Hong Kong and Shanghai. Soros catches her at dawn still feeding them cake by the handfuls; they lick the frosting from her fingers. “What else have you got up your sleeve?” he admonishes her as he packs his bags and leaves.
Now George has a problem: the mistress is pouting, but with greedy eyes still glowing through lowered lashes. The wife is betrayed and in tears: his capitalist free-for-all cronies care nothing for her. Soros’ own feelings have changed, capitalism and democracy, freedom and free markets ... he tries to justify his new thoughts... To read the book, it is important to understand the dichotomy. With the authority of a man caught in the middle, Soros’ The Crisis of Global Capitalism warns that free markets will not be living happily ever after.
As a financier, Soros amassed a fortune primarily with hedge fund management. He describes himself as a one-eyed king among the blind preying on the instability and fluctuation of international markets. Soros makes no apology for that “mistress” nor his position of international influence. He endures the accusation that he personally caused the Asian financial crisis while Russia’s collapse lent propensity and urgency to his theories.
Certain ideas in his book suffer from pedantic ego. Soros grandly renames laissez-faire economics, here dubbed “market fundamentalism.” He declares that economics is not a real, hard science because the graphs only work when affiliated with countless assumptions, and then criticizes every standing theory and theorist. These are not great insights from a billionaire economist; he may as well say that the earth is flat.
Soros then labors to point out, using philosophy, history, and economics, the dangers and flaws in the current age. “Although social values and moral precepts are in doubt, there can be no doubt about the value of money. That is how money has come to usurp the role of intrinsic values.” He succeeds in making the point that specifically global capitalism — “a gigantic circulatory system, sucking up capital into financial markets and institutions at the center and then pumping it out to the periphery...” — works because a lot of people want it to work, but not for the right reasons nor the reasons that lead to a global society.
Kudos to Soros for daring to spell it all out: the warm, fuzzy utopia of global society is a potentially dangerous myth; capitalism and democracy are not synonymous; freedom is not free markets. Inherent instabilities exist in financial markets, and politics on the domestic and international level are not equipped to deal with a global society because there is no morality behind the money.
He has already made his fortune so he can shun the mistress, but he’s worried about the wife: “A society without social values cannot survive and a global society needs universal values to hold it together.” Like a marriage without love, Soros sounds the warning bell.
