Tip this book. Pour some of its bracing tonic into your hands. Slap it on your face. Ah, you needed that.
Editor’s note: The long-serving, indefatigable Peter Lewis prefaced his review of One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank, with this rare but powerfully persuasive note: “Important book below. Send it to the inside front cover piece, by jiminy.” And so, by jiminy, here it is:
From social critic Thomas Frank, editor of The Baffler, the legendary magazine of high-culture criticism: a refreshing, salubrious argument that says nay to all the snake-oil about free-market super-democracy. The New Economy, Frank makes abundantly and maddeningly clear, is in actuality a “tableaux of greed, legislative turpitude, and transparently self-serving sophistry.” Yet this new market is packaged and sold as a medium of consent as much as exchange, as a far more democratic venue than government, a force battling elitism and cynicism, leveling the playing field, bestowing and protecting. The market is where we are fully human, we hear, where we reveal our souls. Beware nationalization, regulation, and union troublemaking, for all snakes in this garden of economic delight where the sons of toil are welcome and the entrepreneur is god. Well, don’t buy this bill of goods, Frank advises. He proceeds, simply, elegantly, in writing that’s fervent and aware – in the hip world but not of it – to debunk all this nonsense. The market is not inherently democratic, he says, agog at the very notion (and he’s no political radical): “the logic of business is coercion, monopoly, and the destruction of the weak, not ‘choice’ or ‘service’ or universal affluence.” Democratic prosperity has never coexisted amid unbridled free markets, but only amid markets with countervailing forces built in to resist the imperatives of profit, and with progressive unions and elected officials to keep a protective eye out for the poor, the strange, the marginalized. And yet now, remarkably and grotesquely, a combination of forces has acted to drape the free market in a cloak of kindness and respectability. Frank charts the constellation of populist symbols and words that equate it with the will of the people and that are spouted by academic flacks, by journalists from Rush Limbaugh to Wired magazine, politicians from Clinton to Gingrich, and management theorists from Walter Wriston to Tom Peters, whose pronouncements grow ever more bombastic in direct proportion to the enfeeblement of checks on the market. Far from a bastion of democracy, Frank points out, the free market of the 1990s brought about a decline in real wages, job security, and benefits, not to mention a disparity in income distribution that should be experienced as shame rather than awe. So much for the social contract, human rights, the future.
Tip this book. Pour some of its bracing tonic into your hands. Slap it on your face. Ah, you needed that.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-49503-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
An informative and creatively multilayered Google guidebook from the businessman’s perspective.
Two distinguished technology executives share the methodology behind what made Google a global business leader.
Former Google CEO Schmidt (co-author: The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, 2013) and former senior vice president of products Rosenberg share accumulated wisdom and business acumen from their early careers in technology, then later as management at the Internet search giant. Though little is particularly revelatory or unexpected, the companywide processes that have made Google a household name remain timely and relevant within today’s digitized culture. After several months at Google, the authors found it necessary to retool their management strategies by emphasizing employee culture, codifying company values, and rethinking the way staff is internally positioned in order to best compliment their efforts and potential. Their text places “Googlers” front and center as they adopted the business systems first implemented by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who stressed the importance of company-wide open communication. Schmidt and Rosenberg discuss the value of technological insights, Google’s effective “growth mindset” hiring practices, staff meeting maximization, email tips, and the company’s effective solutions to branding competition and product development complications. They also offer a condensed, two-page strategy checklist that serves as an apt blueprint for managers. At times, statements leak into self-congratulatory territory, as when Schmidt and Rosenberg insinuate that a majority of business plans are flawed and that the Google model is superior. Analogies focused on corporate retention and methods of maximizing Google’s historically impressive culture of “smart creatives” reflect the firm’s legacy of spinning intellect and creativity into Internet gold. The authors also demarcate legendary application missteps like “Wave” and “Buzz” while applauding the independent thinkers responsible for catapulting the company into the upper echelons of technological innovation.
An informative and creatively multilayered Google guidebook from the businessman’s perspective.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1455582341
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Business Plus/Grand Central
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
A declaration worth hearing out in a time of growing inequality—and indignity.
Noted number cruncher Sperling delivers an economist’s rejoinder to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Former director of the National Economic Council in the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the author has long taken a view of the dismal science that takes economic justice fully into account. Alongside all the metrics and estimates and reckonings of GDP, inflation, and the supply curve, he holds the great goal of economic policy to be the advancement of human dignity, a concept intangible enough to chase the econometricians away. Growth, the sacred mantra of most economic policy, “should never be considered an appropriate ultimate end goal” for it, he counsels. Though 4% is the magic number for annual growth to be considered healthy, it is healthy only if everyone is getting the benefits and not just the ultrawealthy who are making away with the spoils today. Defining dignity, admits Sperling, can be a kind of “I know it when I see it” problem, but it does not exist where people are a paycheck away from homelessness; the fact, however, that people widely share a view of indignity suggests the “intuitive universality” of its opposite. That said, the author identifies three qualifications, one of them the “ability to meaningfully participate in the economy with respect, not domination and humiliation.” Though these latter terms are also essentially unquantifiable, Sperling holds that this respect—lack of abuse, in another phrasing—can be obtained through a tight labor market and monetary and fiscal policy that pushes for full employment. In other words, where management needs to come looking for workers, workers are likely to be better treated than when the opposite holds. In still other words, writes the author, dignity is in part a function of “ ‘take this job and shove it’ power,” which is a power worth fighting for.
A declaration worth hearing out in a time of growing inequality—and indignity.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7987-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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