How the global “free market” has exploited crisis and shock for decades — and plunged millions into suffering.

Naomi Klein (No Logo) unleashes a blistering populist critique of the calamitous neo-liberal economic policies forced upon developing countries — and even in the United States — over the past four decades. Klein argues that these policies — privatization, public spending cuts, deregulation, free trade — are both bad economics (they bring about depression more often than growth) and bad morality (they throw millions into poverty and lead to massive looting of state assets).

So why do populations submit to them? In Klein’s analysis, usually some massive crisis — a coup, a natural disaster, the sudden collapse of an empire — creates an opening for neo-liberal ideologues to impose their prescriptions upon populations still reeling from the disaster. (Sound far-fetched? Milton Friedman, father of neoliberal economics, himself said, “Only a crisis, real or perceived, produces real change.”)

Klein supports her argument with a myriad of examples — from Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, post-Soviet Russia, Asia after the 1997 financial crisis, even post-Katrina New Orleans — where the basic pattern repeats with startling precision. More controversially, Klein draws connections between economic policy, shock and awe warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s.

Based on meticulous historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting, The Shock Doctrine shows how disaster capitalism has created a "disaster capitalism complex," consisting of corporations that thrive on catastrophe, through the exploitation of crisis-shocked populations.