Talk:A Failure of Capitalism

A fact from A Failure of Capitalism appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 9 September 2009 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Judge Richard Posner's 2009 book, A Failure of Capitalism, moves away from his past advocacy of free-market capitalism and criticizes the Bush administration's policies?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2009/September.

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POV

I have added the POV tag for this article. I believe that it currently represents a slanted point of view because it does not properly present judge Posner's nuanced view of the credit crisis. A few specific example that I consider to be slanted are:

That Posner "turns on capitalism." He does not do this. He argues against one form of capitalism
There is only a section for the criticism of Bush, where throughout the book Posner puts as much blame on Bill Clinton as he does for Bush on certain issues, such as the encouragement of the "ownership society" mentioned in the "Criticism of George W. Bush" section (see pages 242-243 and 270-271 for representative examples).
The "Reception" subjection is clearly a biased set of value judgments and subjective analysis of book reviews. All three reviews are from liberal news sources (The Huffington Post and The Irish Times are advertised as liberal, whereas the New York Times is not) and all are cast in a non-neutral manner that is not appropriate for an encyclopedia entry.

These are merely some examples, but I believe that the entire weight of the article is biased. I believe that, while it may not need to be entirely re-written, substantial revisions need to be made.JEN9841 (talk) 04:30, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that there is a slight POV tilt, but the subject book has a strong POV, so I do not know how to mute the POV of Judge Posner without making the article unreadable and non-notable. I don't mean to be argumentative, but I contest the allegation that the New York Times has a liberal bias. It is an out-of-date trope, an urban legend which has not been true since at least 9/11. The N.Y. Times may be statist, conformist, Libertarian, or elitist, but it is not progressive by any definition of that word. Posner's criticism of W. is what makes the book notable. I'll try to clean up any of my biases. Bearian (talk) 15:19, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I fixed what I could. I have read references that the Washington Times reviewed the book, but I can't find a link. Can you find it and add it? Bearian (talk) 16:21, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I can see no remaining POV issues here Victuallers (talk)

Thank you! But I still want to find that WT book review. Bearian (talk) 20:15, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have removed the NPOV banner that I put up, but this does not mean that I think the article is perfect. Namely, I take issue with the fact that the article does not accurately reflect Posner's view. My main beef is that Posner, while pointing out that systemic failures of unregulated financial markets driven by low interest rates did caused the depression, it was not a failure of business nor was it a result of greed, stupidity, or wrongdoing. It was the result of rational actors operating in a system that had in place incentives that lead to a market failure (such as the compensation of CEOs, the opacity of securities backed by mortgages and credit default swaps, and the collective "bubble mindset"). I think the article excessively highlights criticisms of political actors (Greenspan, presidents) at the expense of discussing regulatory failures (such as the laxity of SEC chairman Christopher Cox). When I have more time I will address these issues myself. JEN9841 (talk) 01:10, 9 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I will work on it more in the coming weeks. Just this morning, I found a hard copy of a review in New York (magazine), which I will add. Bearian (talk) 18:12, 9 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]