Profit Over People

Outline

Profit Over People (1999) is a sharp critique of the free-market economic policies that shaped the global economy in the late twentieth century. Noam Chomsky argues that these policies, often promoted as natural and inevitable, concentrated wealth and power in the hands of large corporations and weakened democracy. Through a series of essays, the book encourages readers to question how economic decisions are made and whom they serve.

• Free-market policies that shaped the late twentieth-century global economy are often presented as natural and inevitable, but they were choices.
• Chomsky argues these policies concentrated wealth and power in the hands of large corporations.
• The book contends that corporate concentration of power has weakened democracy.
• It asks readers to question how economic decisions are made and whom they actually serve.

Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, and political commentator who spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He transformed the study of language with his theory of generative grammar and is also known as a prominent critic of foreign policy and corporate power. His books include Syntactic Structures, Manufacturing Consent, and Profit Over People.