Don't read Adam Tooze

This is an extended version of my Goodreads review of his new book "Shutdown," along with an essay of his I found at Noema Magazine about how China dodged the early post-USSR Russian implosion.

Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Problematic and troubling technocratic narrative

The "problematic and troubling" is NOT about the material in the narrative. It's not about "all shall bow before Xi Jinping." Rather, the narrative itself (including Tooze's take on China and COVID) is what's problematic and troubling. And, like British new leftist Perry Anderson's take on Tooze's "Crashed," I speak from several degrees to his left, albeit here in America, not the UK. But, I'm not close to a Trumpist, contra other low reviewers.

A deeply problematic book.

By page 11, Tooze is describing Dems’ Green New Deal as though it were pristine and unsullied, rather than a watered-down ripoff of the Green Party’s original. If a centrist mag like Atlantic or a left-center (but moving a bit more left) site like TNR (can’t remember which one) could report this, why can’t Tooze have it?

Especially since he doubles down on this story. And does so mulitiple times.

Probably because it would spoil his narrative.

The narrative? With a plasticine definition of “neoliberalism,” the main narrative by page 30 seems to be that neoliberalism can stretch to fit anything, just as much as his definition of it. The ergo that comes from that is that, if neoliberalism got anything wrong before, a better version of it will fix things in the future.

Also by page 30, he downplays the more baleful parts of neoliberalism in the west (inequality gap grows) and globally (increased climate change by carbon and other pollution being exported to places with less regulation and increased exploitation of workers, especially minorities like China’s Uyghurs).

In other words, we’ve got a book written by a technocratic neoliberal celebrating the “pragmatic” work of most central banks and using that pragmatism to underpin his plasticine.

Other problems, some bigger, arise after that.

The first and foremost is Tooze’s assumption that China controlled COVID as well as it claimed it controlled it. Even before he makes this claim / accepts this assertion, he’s undercut it by talking about Chinese restrictions on COVID-related information leaving the country. (As I write up this review, per Worldometers, China claims less than 5K COVID deaths, a number that’s laughable. It reports fewer total cases than Rwanda, also laughable.) We also have good evidence that larger nations of East Asia, like Vietnam, haven’t controlled COVID as well as they have claimed, or as their reflexively anti-American parroters in the West have claimed. Then, there’s the related vaccine issue. China’s is worse than anything developed in the West. And, the most Westernized Asian nation, Japan, was a flop on distributing Western vaccines.

In the last full chapter of the book, Tooze really jumps the shark, with his claims about efficaciousness of the Chinese and Russian vaccines.

Sinopharm has much less study than Western vaccines. Plenty of news stories note this. They also note that inactivated virus vaccines may have less potency than mRNA or adenovirus jabs. Tooze ignores all of this. He also ignores that China had reported only relatively limited clinical trial data.

Sputnik V? Production problems. It’s why WHO never approved it. And, its clinical trial data was so bad to leave open the question of data manipulation.

Also ignored.

Now, more details on some of this only came out after Tooze's book, but some of this information was out there last year, or at the start of this. And, if he didn't have a chance to know of this, he shouldn't have made the claims he did. (Amazon has a pub date of Sept. 7, 2021, to be precise, so that largely removes even that excuse.)

And, on this, with me already seeing this as a three-star book, it fell to two stars.

There was one final failure in the conclusion. Tooze talks about the “huge East-West gradient” in dealing with COVID. Of course, he bases this on accepting Chinese data, or lack if it, at face value, and ditto for Vietnam and some other nations. At the same time, he ignores the clusterfuck response of one major East Asian nation, Japan. He also ignores that at least one “Western” nation, New Zealand, did generally quite well.

Beyond all of this, some of his tangents, like Middle Eastern rivalries becoming more exacerbates, aren’t really even tangentially connected to COVID.

If this is a “grand narrative,” which he calls it, then it’s a dime-novel version of one.

And, at that point, before getting to the conclusion of my original review, I want to talke about his Noema piece. It ties with his intellectual dishonesty about China expressed repeatedly throughout "Shutdown." I call it intellectual dishonesty because a professor at Columbia who writes for international public and foreign policy magazines knows the truth about China issues (and should know the truth about things like the Green New Deal).

The piece is all about how China, in the late 1980s, avoided Russia's implosion at the end of the USSR and start of the new Russian Federation. And, yes, China may have had good leadership and smart economists, but the amount of difference in their situations, HUGE differences, is all omitted by Tooze.

First, China was a member of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank since 1980, when the membership it had since 1945 was stripped from the Republic of China and given to the People's Republic. Remember that James Earl Carter, arguably our first neoliberal president, was in the White House then and not St. Ronald of Reagan. Russia didn't get membership in either organzation until 1992.

Ditto on most-favored-nation status. Russia didn't get that until 1992, either. And, in all three cases, US strings were attached that weren't for China. Again, Tooze knows all this. And, given that Noema started out of a partnership with the WaPost and Puff Hoes, the turd-polishing of China, and the shin-kicking of Russia, shouldn't be surprising. Bipartisan foreign policy establishmentarian par for the course. I don't recognize all the names on the editorial board, but I see enough. Walter Isaacson, writer of crappy modern history books and bios and Aspen Institute "guru"; Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn; Fareed Zakaria of Beltway media; Pico Iyer; and Puff Hoes founder Arianna Huffington. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong of the LA Times etc.

And with that, I not only recommend against reading this book, but as with select other authors, I recommend against reading Tooze in the future, period. His lack of engagement with COVID facts, especially vis-a-vis Beijing, is troubling.

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