America’s leading right-wing humorist (not a very crowded field, admittedly) turns to that dismal science, economics. There’s no need to find your college notes, however, since Samuelson had it all wrong, according to Prof. O’Rourke (Give War a Chance, 1992; All the Trouble in the World, 1994; etc.). The libertarian comedian first offers a succinct primer on the workings of Wall Street that is largely accurate and entirely fun. It’s a difficult subject: “One minute we’re loading our possessions on top of the Ford and fleeing the dust bowl. The next minute we’re buying dust futures on the Chicago Commodity Exchange.” So reporter O’Rourke travels, tax deductibly, to divers parts of the world to determine why some places prosper and some just stink. Albania, ruined by avarice and pyramid schemes, is awful. Sweden is a pleasant place but too socialist to make it, according to our dubious analyst. Cuba is a mess; Tanzania, another mess; Russia, a puzzle (and a mess); Hong Kong, a prime example of capitalism (but destined to be a mess); Shanghai, clean (but a financial mess). The author disses the Third World—and the Second, too—wonderfully, and concludes, like many before him, that the free market is a moral device like no other. Well-defined rules may be necessary, but laissez-faire is the ultimate answer. A nature lover chained to a tree will save one tree, says O’Rourke; a financial pirate, however, provides “schools, roads and U.S. Marines, not to mention Interior Department funding to save any number of trees and the young idealists chained thereto.” (We are not told who, save the idealist, is going to divert enough from the leathernecks and the clear-cutters to save those trees). It’s all selective blarney, of course, and a funny, pungent paean to the glory of free enterprise as well. (First printing, 150,00; $150,000 ad/promo; author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-87113-719-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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