The Neoliberal Bailout

Jonathan Kirshner

July 07, 2014

 

The System Worked: How the World Stopped Another Great Depression

Daniel W. Drezner

Oxford University Press, $29.95 (cloth)

The System Worked is a smart, thoughtful, and important book that I largely disagree with. Daniel Drezner, a professor of International Politics at Tufts University and notable public intellectual (he wrote a pioneering and widely admired blog for Foreign Policy and now writes for the Washington Post), has crafted a cogent, counterintuitive interpretation of the global financial crisis. The argument is neatly summed up by the book’s title, and on its first page: “The punch line of this book is that the conventional wisdom is wrong. In response to the 2008 financial crisis . . . global economic governance responded in an effective and nimble fashion. In short, the system worked.”

There is much to agree with in this claim: however bitter the experience of our lingering economic malaise—the “great recession”—the world did indeed avoid another Great Depression. Another such cataclysmic meltdown could have easily taken place in the wake of the financial crisis, as many analysts at the time feared. Drezner disarmingly notes that he was among the pessimists in those dark hours. He positions the book as his explanation of why he was wrong then and why, unlike many more conventional analysts, he is more sanguine now.