A provocative thesis couched in measured, scholarly language. Watch the editorial pages of Bloomberg News and the Wall...
A carefully stated cri de guerre against “the current cult of leadership” that characterizes corporate culture—and leads to extraordinary paychecks.
Why is it that the head of an American corporation should be paid millions—sometimes tens of millions—more per year than an entry-level worker there? Ask a member of the board, writes legal scholar Dorff (Southwestern Law School), and you’re likely to be told that chief executive compensation is so high because that leader is indispensable to the success of the company. In the case of GE’s Jack Welch, that may have been so: After all, he increased the company’s worth nearly 30 times over in his tenure. But what of those executives who preside over near-catastrophic loss of worth and market share, layoffs and scandal, yet receive their stock payouts and fat paychecks regardless? The theories underlying the supposed indispensability of the CEO, writes Dorff, lack “strong empirical support.” Instead, in many cases, CEOs are rewarded disproportionately simply because other CEOs are rewarded disproportionately. A corporate culture has developed in which it’s assumed that this vicious circle is the natural order of things; it’s not corruption or cronyism that makes this so, but a simple misreading of the world. Dorff proposes that rather less quantifiable rewards be encouraged, among them “harnessing reputational desires, creating motivational cultures, and cultivating internal drives.” Understandably, many bosses will prefer the money, but Dorff’s insistence that corporations need less-expensive leadership seems intuitively right. If nothing else, the shift in accounting methods that he describes favors the reforms he suggests, including perhaps adding more restricted stock to compensation packages instead of options, which “reduces the lottery factor in CEO pay.
A provocative thesis couched in measured, scholarly language. Watch the editorial pages of Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal to see whether it catches on.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-520-28101-1
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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