Rating: 
Summary: An international financier frankly speaks his mind
Review:
George Soros is without question one of the greatest success stories of the capitalist system. Born in Hungary in 1930, he managed to survive the Second World War and escaped from communist Hungary in 1947. After arriving in the United States in 1956, he founded an international investment fund and grew to become one of the world's richest people. He is also one who speaks his mind and puts his money behind it. Estimates are that he has donated over five billion dollars to various causes around the world. He is best known for supporting open society initiatives in the countries of the former Soviet block, which is the source of the book's title. Unlike other organizations, he spends the money locally and monitors the results.
As an international financier and trader, Soros is someone who must be taken seriously when he puts forward arguments concerning the rights and wrongs of the global economic system. A large portion of the book is his interpretation of the causes and consequences of the global financial crises that took place in the 1990 - 2000 timeframe.
This covers the international financial crisis that began in Thailand in 1997 and the Mexican crisis of 1994. While he states that he saw the problems coming, he is also very candid in saying that he was wrong in many of his deals, especially when he thought a bottom had been reached. After describing the events, he goes on to put forward what he feels are solutions to the problems.
His arguments put forward in this book are somewhat controversial, although not as radical as some who oppose his political views make them out to be. He is very critical of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), forcefully arguing that their policies often make matters worse. He is hardly alone in this, experts of all political persuasions consistently argue that the IMF treats every problem as if it were one in a western capitalist culture.
He draws the most ire when he criticizes the American political/economic system and how it treats other nations and peoples. However, his criticisms are not that far out of the bounds of the statements of President Dwight Eisenhower, when he warned of the military-industrial complex and those of William Lederer in his classic book, "The Ugly American."
Soros is also dead right when he describes the absurd NATO involvement in Kosovo. The political and military leaders of NATO were so afraid of casualties in their military that nearly all bombing was from high altitudes. Since this led to a substantial reduction in the accuracy of the bombing, there were many instances of non-military targets being hit. In essence, they traded the possibility of losing the lives of a few of their pilots for the deaths of hundreds of innocents on the ground.
While I do not agree with all of what Soros says in this book, his is a voice for democratic change in the world. His grant money and support has led to more open communication around the world, with a spreading of the principles of democracy. He is a fascinating man, and everyone should pay serious attention to him, independent of whether you accept his political positions.
Rating:
Summary: Pay no attention to the Freepers
Review: .
Out of curiosity about what makes Soros tick I checked out a library copy of this book. After about the first thirty pages I was ready to upchuck. Less than two years ago (2002) this con-man was convicted in France (and the French are usually very tolerant) of insider trading. In other words, he makes his money by cheating. Not playing by the rules is how he's made his billions. His ill-gotten wealth doesn't establish him as a humanist or authority on world problems, but a lot of really dumb and naive people think it does.This poorly written attempt at authorship shows him to be just another one-worlder and reveals his hypothesis that for economic stability there should be no separate nations. Soros is a gifted crackpot; gifted in that he is an expert at not playing by the same rules of law as the rest of us, and a crackpot in his views of a one world utopia. No wonder he is financing opposition to a nationalistic and patriotic U. S. president. This book is political propaganda in disguise. Save your money and read the much more informative "The Secret World of Money" by Andrew M. Gause.
Rating: 
Summary: Repetitive, too long, poorly written, naive...don't bother
Review: Brilliant: intimate knowledge of collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia. Mr. Soros is honest and intelligent. He describes peronal experience on this stage and demonstrates adequate consequences for the western countries.
Naive: his hope, that the center wants to establish the Open Society the world over. Most people from the center are eager only for their own wealth. I do not think that the proposed plan will function. Otherwise: is such kind of society really worth of desire? It is not so certain, as Mr. Soros wants to persuade us.
Nebulous: the model of Reflexivity. Here some points. You do not need to have the perfect knowledge about things; it is enough to know about issues, which matter. If we all think, that the absolute true is not attainable, then we have to deal only with imperfect things. You then lose the ideal to follow by building the better world. But it is old disease of materialist Popper: no ideals, only the blind pieces of try and error.
Interesting: what Mr. Soros is thinking now, after the sep.11. and the new war by the USA? Very smart book. Congratulations! Ph.D. Levan Gvelesiani, Germany
Rating:
Summary: Greatest Overview Book Ever Written On Economics/Politic
Review: Different than CEOs that have made billions of dollars from a single company common stock holding and options. Soros had to digest massive amounts of information every day and make hundreds of correct decisions to accumulate his wealth. Implicitly, his knowledge of the world had to be superb and more accurate than most other people. That is the reason I chose to read this book carefully.
Soros powerfully develops why the fallibility of even the brightest individuals and the best of government institutions is profoundly persistent as to be nearly certain over time in the social sciences and economics. Fallibility is the most powerful foundation argument for pursuing the open society worldwide. Soros states an open society needs free markets, rule of law, democratic rule and enough cultural freedom to be constantly improving or remaking itself. Choices need to made at the lowest smallest possible level of governments and companies. Individual freedoms need to be accentuated. Much like eastern philosophy we can't expect grand goals to be realized as we move forward as a society or individual. Our course needs to be constantly changing toward the improved understanding of goals as we approach them. Soros says that: Even though, the invisible hand of the free markets consistently comes up with better answers for the good of everybody collectively than any government, these free markets should not be worshipped without qualification. Doubts should exist. Soros says: We have yet to see a nation that has all the freedoms and individual independence that is warranted by the experience of history. Yet, there is a pressing need for compassion for those that are failing within both the free and oppressed nations. He is concerned about the moral fiber of a free market system as people need to belong to a community and/or society that stands for more than free markets. He makes the case for international institutions to work on global problems of oppressive governments and improving economic relationships throughout all nations. He is very critical of the current institutional skills embodied in international efforts to manage the economic and the political system. The reviewer that thinks Soros does not address how his trading skills developed was dreaming of simple answers instead of Soros insights. Soros discussion of reflexivity is very helpful. Soros concedes that basic commodities markets may realize the magic of the equilibrium market price created by the invisible hand that economists worship. However, when it comes to financial markets where he has incredible knowledge to impart, he shows over and over again how financial markets get out of balance and can persist out of balance for some time. The public does not want to hear that stock market is a violent place. There is nothing the government or investors can do about severe market swings. Investors should stop being cheer leaders for their favorite stocks. Take Soros advice and revel in the discovery of your errors and potential wrong headed directions. Logic helps but rigidity will kill you. Soros has many powerful insights about the disequilibrium of financial markets and its impact on company profits and the economy in total. While the book is much more than his thoughts on the stock market, a serious professional money managers will find his own fears vividly described. All professional managers concerns about how the markets fail to work smoothly are spelled out in lucid detail. Soros helps you understand how to deal with the times that other professional get it very wrong but are driving the markets very far in the wrong direction. He shows how to enthusiastically develop ways to sense when you are going to lose even though you have a good understanding of reality. If you have not manage money professionally, you may well miss many of his profound points. Note the incredible success of Soros and adjust to the fact that he speaks with greater authority that any other writer on financial markets in these times. How you deal with his broader applications beyond the financial markets is what makes the book so fascinating and provocative. Soros is not attacking capitalism. The notion that Soros is forecasting the demise of the global economic system is very silly. Soros evaluates the future very cautiously.. he has concerns not bold forecasts. Soros shows over and over again how difficult it is to predict the future and markets. Soros shows in vivid detail why you should very distrustful of people that make bold predictions as the reviewer reckless assigns to Soros. Read the book. That reviewer deserve your most unbridled rebuke. How could the reviewer get the impression that Soros was saying: If only Marx and the Former Soviet Union leaders could have only explained communism better it might have worked. Soros negative views on communism could not be more lucid. He is screaming at maximum volume for more liberties and freedom of choice and particularly freedom of thought. He would find the typical American college a stifling place to try to learn new insights. Two world Wars book ending a great depression and a cold war of massive proportions have left most people with an aggressive bias that governments ought to do something--- anything. I am left with the feeling that Soros does not understand that these great ills were created by governments that then argued that political and economic freedoms were not working and therefore let us the government do something for you. If you share a belief in big government on a global scale you will find encouragement in this book. However, Soros has the dream that global government agencies can do big things without infringing on his cherished freedoms and liberties. Freedoms that are his first love and not an afterthought.
Rating: 
Summary: At times very good, but in need of editing
Review: George Soros has written an interesting and thought-provoking book with a goal that could hardly be any more ambitious. Open Society is nothing less than a vision for a new economic and political architecture for the world. The book starts out by presenting a 'Conceptual Framework' that serves to outline the basic principles, such as fallibility and reflexivity, upon which Mr. Soros analyses the present and builds a vision for the future. In many ways, this is the best written, most original and most coherent and convincing part of the book. This is achieved by a fair amount of repetition but also good logic and evidence of the author having thought about the ideas for a long time and researched them thoroughly. Mr. Soros is undoubtedly a very intelligent and well-read man.
The second part of the book deals with the present moment in history and can actually itself be divided into two parts. It begins by analyzing the global capitalist system, and then discusses the Asian crisis and the events that have taken place in Russia and eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first two of these are very interesting and give good introduction to the global financial system. The section on Russia is not as engaging and I have a suspicion that Mr. Soros' personal feelings perhaps interfere a bit with his objective analysis. Part two of the book concludes with the author's suggestions for a new global economic and political architecture. There certainly are nuggets of great wisdom and even brilliance here but the writing is hopelessly unconvincing compared to the first part of the book and at times quite frustrating. Mr. Soros draws up inadequate straw men representing his main opponents 'market fundamentalists' and 'geopolitical realists' and then in due course attempts to cut them down. Unlike the first half of the book, which is much more convincing and logically sound, one constantly wants to interrupt the author with lots of "Oh yeah, but what about X ...". All in all, the book is interesting and definitely a worthwhile read although it is in need of better editing and some serious, critical proofreading. In fairness to Mr. Soros, one of the central themes of the book is fallibility and he does stress that he is not, nor can be, completely right. The book ends with the confession: "I have gone about as far as I can on my own. I have learned a lot from other people's criticism, and I can continue to do so after the book is published." A brave admission, among many in the book, and one should give Mr. Soros credit for putting forth his best and welcoming the reaction. Well George, in that spirit, I have a dog-eared, highlighted copy with comment-filled margins that you are welcome to have a look at. Looking forward to the next edition.
Rating: 
Summary: Re-Flex What?
Review: George Soros is something of a house-hold name, not in every home across America like Martha Stewart of course(post-ImClone), but especially in those of the Upper West Side of Manhatten or Park Lane in London or indeed to anyone who has Bloomberg.
Soros' Quantum fund and the rebranded Soros Fund Management LLC are currency speculators and have made billions on currency speculation burning the currencies of developing nations such as Thailand and Malaysia in South East Asia in 1997, and indeed pocketing $2 bn on the devaluation of the british pound on black wednesday 1992 when the UK exited the ERM.
However, the 1990s wasn't all about making money, it was about losing some too. In fact, over $1.4 bn was lost in Russia after the August 1998 financial crisis.
It seemed that the Russians didn't like Soros very much so last winter they surrounded his Open Society Building in Moscow before sending in private security firms to ransack its offices. Since then, Soros has sinced announced the Society will become 'autonomous'
So what was Soros to do after all of this excitement. Well, at the same time as funding opposition parties to George W. Bush before the 2000 election, and funding charitable/philanthropic projects (you gotta love those tax breaks), he thought he would write a book proclaiming impending global economic meltdown.
However, it seems that Soros is not as good at writing books as destroying the economies of developing nations. In fact, his book is the biggest load of old bollocks I have ever read in my entire life, and I read Harry Potter & The Philospher's Stone.
After struggling to contain my boredom at the opening....questioing whether this guy was for real, I totally gave up when Soros introduced 'his theory' of reflexivity in the capital markets....re-flex what?
If you really want to learn about the 'Crisis of Global Capitalism' and its dangers, visit www.soros.org
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Summary: Financial Speculators Against Libertarianism!
Review: Here are two reasons to read this book -- 1) Learn why George Soros, one of the world's wealthiest men, a billionaire financial speculator, says that dogmatic belief in the so-called "free market" is every bit as dangerous as a comparably dogmatic belief in Marxism-Leninism (a topic Soros knows something about, given that he grew up under a Marxist-Leninist government in Eastern Europe). 2) Learn about the philosopher Karl Popper, a beacon of rationality in a tribalistic world. Soros is an intellectual follower of Popper, author of the renowned "The Open Society and Its Enemies," and Soros attempts to apply Popper's thinking to the current crisis of global capitalism. Whether he draws the correct conclusion in every case is less the point than the serious thinking involved. Popper is widely misunderstood to be an advocate of the free market. What he is actually in favor of is freedom of thought -- skepticism of any received dogma, including the dogma of the Free Market, to which many now say There Is No Alternative. Rubbish, says Popper, and so says Soros. A legal, regulatory framework is required. Without the appropriate regulation, the result is the "gangster capitalism" of Russia, and of Enron. Along with Nobel Prize-winning economists Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz among others, Soros is absolutely right in his basic point, and is making a contribution to the construction of an appropriate institutional architecture for an increasingly global society.
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Summary: Pay no attention to the Freepers
Review: In case you don't know, "Freepers" are fans of a certain far-out-right-wing-nut website and they go on sites likes this and "freep" it by giving books one-star reviews. They try to infiltrate other sites and shut them down. They're rotten to their cores. One Freeper halfwit from St. Paul, MN (his "review" is below) is posting the same review for every one of Soros' books. I love how they spend so much energy being pathetic little sheep. Anyway, buy this book, it's wonderful and very insightful. I've learned a lot.
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Summary: Hypocrisy from a convicted criminal
Review: Soros unashamedly admits to making money by exploiting market anomalies, even if this meant impoverishing nations. Soros then does an about turn and espouses the need for social values, in order to curb greed, and bring sanity to the markets. He tries to reposition himself as a philanthropist after many years of excess, which is insulting. I found Soros to have pent up issues with regards to the academic fraternity, and his lack of widespread acceptance as a thinker. In so far as his success is concerned, he needs to explore probability theory and survivorship bias. Because he was successful is not justification enough to denounce Efficient Market Theory. On the whole the book is a waste of time, although he does provide a few rewarding insights into how the West functions.
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Summary: Reflecting on ¿Reflexivity¿
Review: The book consists of roughly two parts. The first is the philosophical foundation of the "theory of reflexivity", with application to financial markets and historical process in general, resulting in the "Open Society" concept. The second is the assessment of the present moment of history and the author's vision of the future of the global financial and political architecture. The "reflexivity theory", already developed by George Soros in his earlier books (e.g. "The Alchemy of Finance") can be summed up in his own words: "We are part of the world we seek to understand, and our imperfect understanding plays an important role in shaping the events in which we participate." This entails recognition of the fundamental limitations of the social science and our own understanding of society. "It (reflexivity) creates a cleavage between the natural and social sciences and it undermines the postulate on which economic theory has been based: rational behavior in general and rational expectations in particular." This is a powerful statement indeed. It immediately follows that the future of humankind is not only unknown, or too difficult to predict, but unknowable, because self-awareness and attempts at prediction influence events and change the course of history. This line of reasoning has more immediate application in the financial markets. The widely accepted "efficient market theory" postulates that market participants absorb all available information in an objective and efficient manner, and new information is random and unpredictable relative to previous expectations. If any statistically significant pattern appears in the market data, it should be exploited by many players and will soon disappear. This seems to be similar to the conclusions of the "reflexivity theory". At the first glance the "reflexivity" process can improve market "efficiency" in line with the arguments of the "market fundamentalists" arguments that market processes automatically self-correct any mispricing. Yet this is not what typically happens according to Soros (and his experience and investment track record suggests that his arguments should be taken very seriously). Instead of self-correcting towards the equilibrium, which characterizes many physical phenomena (such as, for example, most types of wave motion), markets form self-reinforcing tendency which moves further away from the equilibrium. This tendency, eventually turning out wrong ("fertile fallacy", and "radical fallibility" in Soros's terms) is supported by several positive-feedback mechanisms. G. Soros believes that development of the "reflexivity" and "fallibility" concepts should have as profound effect on the thinking of society and historical process, as the Enlightenment and ideas born with French and American revolutions. "It is high time to subject reason, as construed by Enlightenment, to the same kind of critical examination that the Enlightenment inflicted on the dominant external authorities, both divine and temporal. We have now lived in the age of reason for the past two hundred years - long enough to discover that reason has its limitations. We are ready to enter the age Fallibility. The results may be equally exhilarating and, having learned from past experience, we may be able to avoid some of the excesses characteristic of the dawning of a new age." The remainder of the book deals mainly with the application of these ideas to the current moment in history and the author's vision for the global financial and political structure. This is not an easy task, and the author soon begins to fail his own recipe and the paradigm underlying this vision. To his credit, he never fails to recognize his own fallibility. He speaks at length, and very frankly, about his own investment mistakes and failed predictions. This provides a refreshing contrast with many others who prefer to ignore their failures, or, when they are too evident, spend many pages trying to justify or attribute them to some extraneous factors. He begins to miss his beat when speaking about the global financial and political architecture. After presenting sharp, well-argued criticism of the present state of the world, his recipes for improvement look disappointingly weak. Essentially it's all about "kinder, gentler" IMF, WB, NATO and other such institutions. His definition of the "Open Society"(that is, the one based on ideas similar to "reflexivity" and "fallibility") eventually looks like nothing more than touched-up version of any liberal democracy today. It is contrasted with "closed societies", based on authoritarian or nationalistic ideas. Well, throughout the human history the strongest military and economic powers always viewed themselves if not perfect, as the only models truly capable of improvement and progress. Every colonial conquest, no matter how destructive and brutal, was based on the ideological support of "bringing civilization to the barbarians" in one or another form. The "Open Society Alliance" proposed by Soros, doesn't look too different from yet another reincarnation of such ideological foundation. In the model of financial bubbles, which the author described as an application of the "reflexivity theory", the unsustainable booms happen not because skeptical views during the bubble build-up are suppressed by some official censorship, but because even in the presence of critical dissent, the prevailing erroneous consensus become self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. Similarly, the is no reason to believe that, just because of the democratic mechanisms and press freedom, the supposed "Open Society Alliance" will be free from the standard "arrogance of power". Such arrogance and delusion, which often leads to very costly political mistakes, wars or major crises, can happen not just because any other views are suppressed by censorship as in many authoritarian societies. Rather, because of artificial self-perpetuating consensus generated by and propagated through the media and political elite, while maintaining illusion of a genuine vigorous debate by endlessly pouring attention to peripheral issues. The "fallibility" concept truly deserves serious intellectual attention. Too bad that most likely the "center" of the global system - the richest and most powerful nations - will invariable find it harder to apply these criteria to themselves, as opposed to the rest of the world.
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