Hi friends! If you're connected with me on facebook or follow me on twitter, you know already that I met one of my favorite authors this past week. Mario Vargas Llosa was at a dinner I attended, and gave a nearly forty minute speech on the beauty of markets. He also admonished market-oriented actors motivated by greed, the people he blames for destroying the system. He used phrases like "a raging infection contaminating the very essence of the system" and "promising paradise on earth but driving societies into a self-created hell." If you've read his novels, you would have expected this kind of harsh but poignant language; I got the feeling that many of those in attendance had not.
Interestingly, I think there is a tension between people who believe in markets because they are moral in themselves, and those who believe in markets but think they require an external "moral" compass. I believe Vargas Llosa was speaking of the latter, and given the events of the past few years, am inclined to agree with him.
Vargas Llosa won the Nobel prize for literature in 2010. The academy praised him for "his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat." If you haven't read any of his books, I'd start with
The War of the End of the World.
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