I wanted to like this book; I think climate change is the defining issue of our time and was fascinated to read this best-selling take on it. What I got was a rather boring novel interspersed with constant disparaging comments about economics. I’ll admit my bias: I studied economics in college, and so I get sensitive when people who have never taken an economics class suggest they know more about the topic than the entire academic field.
That’s exactly what happens in this book. Between chapters of the plot (to the extent that there is a plot) the author goes on disconnected little tirades about economic concepts for which she apparently read the Wikipedia intro paragraph and stopped there. Economists apparently have never even considered that efficiency isn’t an inherent moral good (in fact, that’s taught at the very start of every Econ 101 class). Discount rates, she claims, are not just evil but “pulled out of a hat” (??). Best of all, she spends a whole chapter railing against economists and liberalism, and then offering the idea of carbon credits as an “alternative” to economics (as if she came up with the idea, and not, you know, economists).
If you want a novel, read a novel. If you want a treatise on green economics, find one by somebody who knows something about the topic. Most disappointing book of the year for me