By Alan Marston, 20 November 2008

 

I hereby nominate Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 – December 12, 1999) as the

greatest economist of the 20th Century and Catch-22 as its textbook. It has taken me exactly 42 years, since being introduced via readings of Catch-22 by my english teacher in the Otago Boys High School Library, to realise how completely accurate is his portrayal of post-WW2 capitalism and the consequences of its global conquest. Not a word, not a deed, not a characterisation in that book, first published in 1961, has not not come to fruition in the inexorable spread of that cancer of modernism, `the market'.

 

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