The windbags of Wall Street and their echo chamber in the media trumpet the value of economic “reform” in developing nations, including the benefits for ordinary people from deregulation and open markets. Siddhartha Deb's The Beautiful and the Damned tells a much different story. In a compact, incisive and beautifully written account of a journey back to his Indian homeland, Deb encounters entrepreneurs and activists, engineers and call-center workers, and ventures to the front line of an agricultural crisis caused by leaving India's farmers to the mercy of agri-business. It's a sad picture of low wages, long hours, depression, the breakdown of meaningful community and Internet-fired rhetoric familiar from similar rants by the Tea Party. In the shadow of Mumbai's glass towers sits a Potemkin village of false promise and, behind that façade, a festering social problem.
