While opinions certainly differ, my guess is that the opinion reached by "Older You" is going to be a lot closer to the historians on the sub than "Teenage You."

I approach Naomi Klein in pretty much the same way that I approach Noam Chomsky. (Though -- being frank -- I think Chomsky's work is more worthwhile than Klein's.) In other words, smart person, often worth reading, capable of making good points, often alters how you approach an issue ... but never, ever, ever lose sight of the fact that you're reading "history" written by a polemicist. Their work is the product of chopping and mixing historical events to fit a particular narrative, and they rarely include anything that counters it. If it doesn't fit the narrative, then from their perspective, it's not important enough to have influenced anything, or it can be glossed over and quickly dropped, or it never happened at all. To an historian, that is terrifying, and all the more so because these books sell on the basis of the outrage they cause.

It's been years since I read The Shock Doctrine and I don't have a copy to hand at the moment. I'm very uncomfortable writing an extensive review of the book as a result, as I'm bound to get some things wrong and I don't want to be unfair to it or Klein.

What I do remember is this, though I'd welcome correction from anyone who's read the book more recently:

• Sure, sounds good: I agree with Klein's basic premise that: a). politicians often attempt to turn political and economic crises to their advantage: b). corporations aren't any different: c). unchecked capitalism can be an incredibly destructive force, and: d). rapid change (particularly that effected during a crisis) is typically disastrous for a society. But I mean, that's basic. That's Baby's First Political Science Lesson. That's Little Golden Books History. The banging and yelling you hear in the distance is the reanimated stinking corpse of Edmund Burke pounding on the roof of his coffin and screaming, "I invented that shit during the 18th century! There's a reason it's called Burkean conservatism!"
• In which the Chinese were taking marching orders from Chicago's econ department: I do not think her assertions re: the Tiananmen Square incident stand up to serious scrutiny. The students involved had a number of grievances with the state, and while I'm sure that a percentage of them wanted greater worker control over industries, there's no serious argument to be made that the Chinese government was, is, or conceivably will be pushing for unregulated capitalism (or any model that isn't shackled to national interests). I suspect this got "left out" of Western accounts of the conflict because it is batshit. The state-owned enterprise model pursued by the Chinese government, growth expectations from provincial officials, and currency manipulation were the antithesis of unregulated capitalism. The students were rightly pissed off about the degree of corruption in the Chinese government and the extent to which wealth from economic advances was being concentrated among politically well-connected people.
• What a bunch of economists actually thought: The Shock Doctrine was reviewed very poorly by most economists. The London Review of Books had an extensive review that I think is very fair, observing both the legitimate outrages that Klein chronicles and conclusions that Holmes thinks are shaky. A notable excerpt: After arguing that Chile was a laboratory for Friedman’s free-market ideals, Klein has to acknowledge the inconvenient fact that Pinochet refused to reverse Allende’s nationalisation of the copper mines. This suggests that Chile’s military rulers were not the lackeys of foreign companies, did not view nationalisation as a step on the road to Communism and were nationalists before they were neoliberals. At one point, Klein herself admits that Pinochet’s Chile was not a laboratory for Chicago School ideals. But this concession is soon forgotten and she continues to hold up the Chilean analogy as evidence that torture in Abu Ghraib, too, had a primarily economic rationale and, indeed, was part of the same ‘crusade to liberate world markets’.
• Oh Christ: Her championing of a more populist approach to economics legitimately frightens me. A populist movement is not necessarily less short-sighted, cruel, selfish, or destructive than a corporation or a government; people are equally capable of being total shits regardless of whose banner they're flying. (I note that Klein devoted an extremely small fraction of the book to abuses perpetrated by people whose belief systems she finds palatable.) 20th century history is a standing rebuke to the notion that doing something for "the people" automatically benefits them more than just inventing something they can use and selling it at a good price. I think Klein sees the market as an inherently corrupting influence rather than being just another form of individual freedom and expression, and that's an astonishingly dismissive attitude. To someone who studies North Korea and knows that a portion of the population survived the 1994-1998 famine solely due to the illegal imports and markets that sprang up, it is not just dismissive, it is enraging.

And something about The Shock Doctrine bothers me on a level that I find difficult to articulate. This is where reasonable people have a lot of room to disagree, so don't take this as gospel. Klein's approach feels opportunistic, for lack of a better way to describe it. It felt like she was only interested in the people she described and their struggles insofar as they were victimized by an institution whose power and reach she was trying to diminish. She's with the Chileans, or the Chinese, or the Argentinians, etc. because they're supposedly examples of how economic reforms can be pushed through a period of crisis, but she never seems to have spent any serious amount of time on their part of history. These people had minds of their own and they were in endlessly complicated situations with equally complicated things influencing their decisions. As with Holmes' example of Pinochet's government, it bothered me that they basically got dropped from the book the moment their actions no longer supported Klein's narrative.

And this weird, sort of infantilizing approach, doesn't stop there. The Shock Doctrine is peddled to people with an argument that effectively says -- your national problems are not your fault, your problems were imposed on you from above, a shadowy group at the top has got it all figured out and is relentlessly pushing its interests at your expense -- and people eat that up with a spoon. There's a reason why The Protocols of the Elders of Zion continues to sell like hotcakes in the Middle East.

I just don't think it's that simple.

But I also don't think Klein would have sold millions of books with that kind of ambiguity.

TL:DR: The Shock Doctrine advances the theory that governments and corporations use or manufacture crises in order to push economic reforms that will primarily benefit themselves. I think she is broadly correct about much of this and that she identifies many legitimate abuses, but there are a lot of very serious problems with the book. Much scarier is the more likely scenario in which no one is at the wheel.