A radical diagnosis and a bold prognostication bound to energize progressives.
Capitalism, writes a British journalist/broadcaster, verges now on self-destruction, and he forecasts an economic future quite unlike any we’ve known.
Predicting the end of capitalism is a game at least as old as Karl Marx, but Mason (Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, 2012, etc.) reminds us that this socio-economic system has not always been with us and, despite its remarkable adaptability, carries with it no guarantee of perpetuity. Old arrangements that ordered the feudal era, after all, collapsed, and something similar may be happening today, requiring us to abandon accepted notions about markets, supply and demand, property ownership and exchange, and “the old relationship between wages, work, and profit.” From a forthrightly leftist perspective, Mason analyzes the external forces—principally income inequality and climate change—and the internal contradictions eroding capitalism as we know it. These he traces to information technology, an unprecedented development that reduces the need for work, corrodes market mechanisms accustomed to scarcity rather than abundance, and features collaborative production of goods and services. The transformation to post-capitalism, he writes, will not be led by the old-model, industrial-laboring class but rather midwifed by the “values, voices, and morals” of a networked generation, connected people who today operate in the interstices of the current system and who tomorrow will replace it. Even readers not quite persuaded will appreciate Mason’s readable, reportorial style, his use of a wide range of economists, business gurus, and economic thinkers to help support his thesis, and his deft treatment of sometimes-difficult economic theories. He’s especially good on the Stalin-era “wave-theory” economist Nikolai Kondratieff, and he shines an eye-opening light on Marx’s 1858 Fragment on Machines (unpublished in English till 1973), which hints at a “route out of capitalism” similar to Mason’s own.
A radical diagnosis and a bold prognostication bound to energize progressives.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-23554-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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
SEEN & HEARD
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