none

Certainly the “new economy” has worked its share of wonders. Priceline.com hired William Shat- ner to tell the world that it was going to be “big, really big,” and the next thing we knew the total stock value of this company that sold discount airline tickets was twice that of United Airlines. Way cool. The fact that no new value had been created in the process mattered not a whit to the folks who knew that the money you got from your inflated Priceline.com stock was real enough.

This ability to “create...wealth by acclamation” has created both its own public boosterism—since “badmouthing the market...could very well bring on crash, disaster, war,”—as well as business theories Frank finds “so elementary they could have been lifted from the back of cereal boxes,” and some really weird ones as well.

Day-trading is “Zen-like.” “Destruction is cool,” therefore corporations should have Chief Destructive Officers. The cover of Fortune tells us to, “Cannibalize Yourself.” Motivational speakers advise that “History is for cowards and losers.” Account Planners derive insight into the meaning of brand names from the study of evolutionary psychology. Tom Peters, of In Search of Excellence fame, finds the new economy so profoundly different that “Now... the people who lift ‘things'...are the new parasites living off the carpal-tunnel syndrome of the computer programmers' perpetually strained keyboard hands.”

Although much of this book is a hoot, Frank continually reminds us that a lot of people apparently in the thrall of some silly “new economic age” thinking are actually making decisions that affect the rest of us, even attempting to replace such elements of economic democracy as we actually have—in the form of unions and government programs like Social Security—with the “magic” of the market.

Of course, exigencies carried over from the old economy—like food and shelter—have a way of intruding upon the fantasies of the new economy. So we read that the workers of etown, an Internet company providing information on consumer electronics, recently petitioned for a union representation election because, no matter how much the Internet may have enriched their lives, they found it difficult to live in San Francisco on their current wages of $420 to $640 per week.

This would have been the first such vote ever to be held in a dot-com company, but for the fact that the company went under. But we can be sure this won't be the last “dot.communist” union drive, because as Frank says, ideology can never overcome “the resilient language of democracy.”          Z

Tom Gallagher is an activist and freelance writer living in California.