A gentle, clear, and accessible hornbook that should crowd out many other general texts.
In just a few easy lessons, economics journalist Wheelan can teach the most innocent reader to think like an economist.
In an effortless, sprightly manner, Wheelan takes us from basic concepts to the most current economic difficulties. Old Man Malthus was wrong, we now know (there’s plenty to eat), but the once-dismal science still has direct application to our present-day lives. The amoral marketplace is not a zero-sum game, but sometimes the market, like French democracy, doesn’t quite work right. That’s why Honda Civics lose head-on confrontations with Ford Explorers. Can you explain why Israel’s gross domestic product is twice that of Saudi Arabia? Maximizing utility, incentive, and human capital may have something to do with it, and so may public policy, as the author demonstrates. He intelligibly bares consequential concepts like “adverse selection,” “deadweight loss,” “asymmetry of information,” and “purchasing power parity”; he nicely explains the difference between fiscal and monetary policy and the Fed’s job, as well as why it matters. Just how economic depression and virulent inflation wreak havoc is made clear. He tells us why the role of our government is largely helpful. (Are you really able to get bin Laden on your own?) Of course, when it comes to government intervention, there are cons along with the pros. (Health care, for example.) Are you discomfited by the policies of the World Bank or the activities of the IMF? Keep reading. You will probably be convinced that on the whole and in the long run globalization is a good thing. (Whether historical forces will work against it and bring on a worldwide depression is yet to be seen). The workings of the financial markets are made simple. Meanwhile, Wheelan’s investment advice, conforming to the immutable laws of economics, is patently sane: save, invest, diversify for the long run, and eschew get-rich-quick schemes.
A gentle, clear, and accessible hornbook that should crowd out many other general texts.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-393-04982-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
Professional longshoreman and itinerant fruit picker Theriault punches in with a perspective that has been out of fashion lately: that of the worker who, he demonstrates, is entitled to some respect. When Theriault talks about work, he does not mean selling stuff or pushing papers or talking on the phone. He means hard physical labor. The trucker and assembly-line worker, the toiling rank and file are his people. He vividly describes life as a fruit tramp and as a dock hand. In 30 years on the waterfront Theriault has unloaded skins and coffee and dealt with gang bosses and walking bosses, lazy youths and wise elders, pain and injury. And he has a proper disdain for the guys with the clipboards. The rotten jobs of the world are surveyed from the viewpoint of the worker, a viewpoint he finds scanted throughout history. Perforce, his perspective is somewhat to the left of the current center. That is appropriate. The author knows exploitation when it is practiced by those ``controlling the means of production,'' to use one of his favorite phrases. He recognizes the political aspects of work, but unlike Marx, he has done hard labor and knows that Marxism is no answer. Theriaultwell read, observant, and wry of witultimately pleads simply for understanding of the men and women with the wrenches and the hoes. ``It takes two to raise a roofbeam,'' he reminds us. And in a time of general downsizing, it's not a bad reminder, for who will buy all the products when those on the production line are out of work? Less Peter Druckerlike than Studs Terkelish, this is a generally enlightening report about the dignity of hard work from the largely unexplored land of the blue collar. No heavy lifting required.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03878-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Microsoft Corp. bestrides the widening world of PC software like a colossus, and here two technology-oriented academics show how the multinational company's success can provide noteworthy lessons for other commercial concerns jockeying for position in volatile high-tech markets. Drawing on apparently unrestricted access to an organization at work over an eventful two-year span (199395), Cusumano (MIT) and Selby (Univ. of California, Irvine) offer a by-the-numbers briefing on what makes Microsoft paradigmatic. They identify seven key strategies CEO William Gates and his top lieutenants employ to keep their enviably profitable and resolutely anti-bureaucratic enterprise well ahead of the pack. Devoting a lengthy anecdotal chapter to each of these operating precepts, Cusumano and Selby start with a detailed account of how the fast-growing firm screens and selects programming personnel. They go on to evaluate the company's effective management of technical talent and the ways it has dominated major sectors of the computer industry, e.g., by obsoleting mainstay products long before rivals are able to do so. Covered as well are the means used by Microsoft to focus the creativity of software developers (mainly by breaking large projects into wieldy tasks for which benchmark priorities have been established) and to meet shipment deadlines for bug-free productsmost of the time at any rate; the loudly promoted introduction of an upgraded and features-laden operating system dubbed Windows 95 this summer affords a case in point. The authors also assess the extent to which the company learns from itself and customers. In a rousing windup, they comment approvingly on how Microsoft (despite constant run-ins with the Global Village's tougher antitrust agencies) continue to ``attack the future,'' based on contemporary calculations of demand, supply, and technology trends. A structured but illuminating overview of a decidedly free- form corporation that may well serve as a textbook exemplar of excellence in ongoing innovation. (10 line drawings) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-874048-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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