A welcome, well-conceived contribution to the history of technology.
Creative destruction meets destructive creation in this economic-historical study of the Internet and its privatization.
The libertarian dream may be to privatize all government services, but that ignores the fact that in many instances, it is government funding that underlies the invention of useful technologies—home-scaled air conditioners, for instance, or aluminum cookware. Greenstein (Chair, Information Technology/Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern Univ.; co-editor: Economic Analysis of the Digital Economy, 2015, etc.) distinguishes invention from innovation as separate processes, innovation, as he writes, being “the act of turning invention into something useful.” It was government initiative that brought a network of computers into being, a mix of private and public innovation that made it into the Internet, thanks in part to the work of government engineer Stephen Wolff, who “made an educated guess that the costs for universities and researchers could be lower if private providers supplied services” that helped the backbone network talk to individual machines, sharing the infrastructure among potentially innumerable constituents. Greenstein concentrates on the 1990s, looking closely at such issues as the browser wars—he concludes that Bill Gates was right to worry about the rise of non-Microsoft Internet gateways—and the origins of the dot-com bubble at the end of the decade. Though he conveys much information through the vehicle of carefully developed case studies on matters such as the divestiture of AT&T and its relationship to the birth of the Internet and the role of federal funding of the research that would give rise to Google, the author is a resolutely academic writer (“accommodating heterogeneous deployment overlapped with the economic benefit” is a characteristic formulation); it helps to have some background in both communications and economics to fully appreciate his arguments. General readers will prefer books such as John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said (2005) and Stephen Levy’s Hackers (1985), though Greenstein notes that his focus—on innovation, not invention—is different from theirs.
A welcome, well-conceived contribution to the history of technology.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-691-16736-7
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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
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