Geography of power: the making of global economic policy * Richard Peet
本书批判新自由主义经济政策由少数未经选举的专家制定，导致全球不平等加剧，并论证经济、意识形态和政治权力如何在全球空间集中。
For many, increasing global inequality represents the biggest challenge of the new millennium. This text looks at how contemporary global economic policies are made, arguing that neo-liberal economic policy is enforced by a few 1000 unelected experts and has failed to deliver tolerable living conditions for the poor. The introduction begins with an essential outline of how the author conceptualizes power. For him, power means control—over the minds, livelihoods and beliefs of others—and is held by institutions and individuals. Today ‘a new kind of economic power system has arrived on the world scene’ (p. 1) in which a few spaces control others at the global scale. Peet breaks this power accumulation down into three (interrelated) types—economic (control over capital), ideological (control over rationalities) and political (control over practice). The ‘geography of power’ is explained as the mapping of institutions as they are located in space. For Peet, clusters of power-generating institutions make up a power centre. Peet clearly states that ‘I take a pretty dim view of conventional economic theory … I will demonstrate, with some validity, that classical, neoclassical and mainstream economics, and the policies based on these theories, are fundamentally flawed — with disastrous results for the peoples ruled by expert opinion, and with rich rewards for the rulers and the experts’ (p. 4). This sets the context the book, and is followed by a journey through the author's conceptualizations of notions such as policy regimes, hegemony, discourse and governmentality. Nearly all the ideas presented are ‘politically critical of capitalist globalization and the neoliberal policy agenda’ (p. 25). Indeed, Peet states that ‘this book is an attack on a global capitalist system that is so callous it is perverted, uncivilized and not worthy of humanity’ (p. 26).