Glass House by Brian Alexander

After making the mistake of reading Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse

Inside the Collapse of Venezuela, I doubled down on depressing myself by reading another tear-jerker story about the death spiral of a small town in Ohio called Lancaster.  The long, excruciatingly depressing story is summarized  at the end by the author:

"Corporate elites said they needed free-trade agreements, so they got them. Manufacturers said that they needed tax breaks and public-money incentives in order to keep their plants operating in the United States, so they got them. Banks and financiers needed looser regulations, so they got them. Employers said they needed weaker unions–or no unions at all–so they got them. Private equity firms said they needed carried interest and secrecy, so they got them. Everybody, including Lancastrians themselves, said they needed lower taxes, so they got them. What did Lancaster and a hundred other towns like it get? Job losses, slashed wages, poor civic leadership, social dysfunction, drugs."

I have personally watched "corporate raiders" buy seats on my previous employer's board of directors and destroy enormous long-term capabilities of the enterprise to extract some short-term cash by shady financial & legal manipulation.  Those experiences were very mild compared to the events in this book.

The author does not consider the inevitable march of technology that enabled competitors to manufacture and sell higher quality, less-expensive glass items.  And he does not mention examples of the failure of government protectionism & regulations in many industries, e.g. paper mills or textiles to stave off market efficiencies and large-scale shifts in manufacturing.  But he does shine a very bright light on the weaponization of large-scale finance for extremely unethical purposes and value destruction.  Throughout the story, we witness the evolution of "corporate raiding" from junk bonds through leveraged buyouts into pump-and-dump deception and asset destruction.  These phenomena in Lancaster, Ohio are an example of the 21st century's acceleration of the extreme wealth redistribution away from the top 20% into the 0.1% of the US population as the rest of the US population falls into lower wealth and the majority of our citizens fall into poverty.  It is utterly depressing.  If you want to cry in despair, get very depressed for a long time, and be outraged with "righteous indignation" (shorten your life, raise your blood pressure), go ahead and read this book.  Otherwise, spend your time reading uplifting, warm, happy stories such as Code Breakers. 2/5 Stars.  Me? I am now too old to subject myself to this self-torture and plan to return to fun, awe-and-wonder space opera.