The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market
August 22 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
$10.00 – $20.00
Book talk with celebrated historian and Harvard University professor Naomi Oreskes examining the enduring myth advanced by business elites and media allies to promote hostility to “big government” and faith in unfettered markets.
Naomi Oreskes is Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science, Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard. A world-renowned earth scientist, historian and public speaker, she is the author of the best-selling book, Merchants of Doubt (2010) and a leading voice on the role of science in society, the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and the role of disinformation in blocking climate action.
She’ll be speaking on her latest book, with Erik Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loath Government and Love the Free Market.
“[A] scorching indictment of free market fundamentalism . . . and how we can change, before it’s too late.”-Esquire
“The bestselling authors of Merchants of Doubt offer a profound, startling history of one of America’s most tenacious-and destructive-false ideas: the myth of the “free market.”
Oreskes is author or co-author of 7 other books, and over 150 articles, essays and opinion pieces, including Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury, 2010), The Collapse of Western Civilization (Columbia University Press, 2014), Discerning Experts (University Chicago Press, 2019), Why Trust Science? (Princeton University Press, 2019), and Science on a Mission: American Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change, (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Merchants of Doubt, co-authored with Erik Conway, was the subject of a documentary film of the same name produced by participant Media and distributed by SONY Pictures Classics, and has been translated into nine languages. A new edition of Merchants of Doubt, with an introduction by Al Gore, was published in 2020.