March Not Fiction Book Discussions

We continue our consideration of the effects of globalization with Boomerang: Travels in the Third World by Michael Lewis. In The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Lewis introduced readers to the few farsighted if ethically questionable financial professionals who saw that the American subprime mortgage industry was poised to fall and made their fortune betting, against the market, that the housing bubble would burst. In Boomerang, Lewis broadens his view to the effects of what he calls "the tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2007." Originally written as a series of articles for Vanity Fair magazine, these essays are travel writing of a sort, as Lewis calls his visits to Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, and California "financial-disaster tourism." As T.J. Stiles notes in The First Tycoon, the Gilded Age saw the rise of the abstraction of the global financial system. One of the great tycoons of that era, Cornelius Vanderbilt, saw the dangers of the system, even as he sought to profit from it. Stiles quotes him as saying, "I'll tell you what's the matter--people undertake to do about four times as much business as they can legitimately undertake. . . . When I have some money I buy railroad stock or something else, but I don't buy on credit. I pay for what I get. People who live too much on credit generally get brought up with a round turn in the long run" (536-37). However, Lewis' provocative thesis is that what is causing the global financial crisis is not just simple greed, but greed combined with the particular national character of each country involved: "The credit wasn't just money, it was temptation. It offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Entire countries were told, 'The lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know.' What they wanted to do with money in the dark varied" (42).

What do you think? Does Lewis make the case that national character explains as much as or more than simple human nature?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, March 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, March 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.