Essential business reading, with advice on how manufacturers can join the AM bandwagon.
How 3-D printing and related technologies will soon “transform the way practically everything is made.”
“Business will never be the same,” writes management strategist D’Aveni (Strategy/Dartmouth Coll.; Strategic Capitalism: The New Economic Strategy for Winning the Capitalist Cold War, 2012, etc.). His readable, well-researched book traces the rise of 3-D printing from its inception in a late-night 1983 experiment to its present applications in manufacturing hearing aids, joint implants, and fighter jets to its quietly evolving role in the rise of giant new businesses he calls pan-industrials, which will “dominate the global economy” within a few decades. As the author explains, 3-D printing is one of many methods known as additive manufacturing, which involves building up materials to make a product. Once AM was deemed useful solely for making customized products in small quantities. Now, it is being used to make “standardized products in mass quantities” by companies like GE and Lockheed Martin, drawn by AM’s extraordinary ability to make “almost anything anywhere,” with greater flexibility, economies of scope and scale, and “levels of quality and efficiency once thought impossible.” Combined with innovative digital tools, writes the author, AM methods will soon replace traditional manufacturing. The resulting pan-industrial firms—“voracious, ever-expanding industrial titans”—will serve as AM–based platforms connecting customers and suppliers in the same manner as Amazon and other consumer platforms. D’Aveni acknowledges that all of this sounds “astounding,” but it is real, and he offers vivid accounts of how AM is playing out today at Zara, a Spanish apparel maker, and Jabil, a Florida-based electronics supplier. Focusing on business (as opposed to technical) aspects, the author details the many benefits of AM and its likely social consequences (obsolescence of millions of jobs but also enough new value in the economy to fund a universal basic income). “Virtually every” manufacturer will have to face this revolution, he writes.
Essential business reading, with advice on how manufacturers can join the AM bandwagon.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-95590-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
SEEN & HEARD
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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