A serious, rigorous contribution to the debate over how to rescue a drowning middle class.
An ambitious book offers a radical proposal to save capitalism by exponentially increasing the number of capitalists.
According to the two debut authors and various politicians, the American middle class is ailing; while wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a plutocratic elite, inequality skyrockets. Chivukula, a New Jersey assemblyman and Democrat, and Musum, a Republican businessman, argue that the crux of the problem is that labor has gradually become severed from capital, and so the vast majority of productivity in the economy is supplied by a disenfranchised class hobbled by an appalling lack of appropriate payment for its efforts. The authors contend that the solution to this problem is to make the economy more inclusive by expanding the private ownership of both small businesses and corporations. This would be largely accomplished by a systematic overhaul of the tax system, which would simultaneously decrease taxes and dismantle various tax barriers to the proliferation of Employee Stock Ownership Plans. Those stock plans permit workers to enjoy the advantages of ownership while avoiding the principal disadvantages: they don’t have to buy this stock with their own wages or front their own property as collateral. The authors repeatedly make clear that this enlargement of the owner class, or the creation of more capitalists, drives their proposal. “Here’s the bottom line: Dramatically accelerate broad based property/capital ownership. Do that by requiring every corporate tax incentive conditioned on having some form of a broad based ownership share plan for their workers. Period.” The authors believe that this approach navigates between the alternatives of ferocious capitalism and ideological socialism. They call this the third way, which is an expression of “economic democracy.” This is not a facile exercise in political idealism: Chivukula and Musum furnish considerable empirical evidence that their strategy will not only work, but also be politically appealing to a broad spectrum of citizens, irrespective of party allegiances. They overstate the manner in which they provide a new alternative to both capitalism and socialism—this is really an intensification of capitalism. They likely also exaggerate the bipartisan allure of their ideas, since many will reject the central role given to the continued health and reliability of the corporate sector. But this remains an impressively ambitious effort to find pragmatic and innovative solutions to problems created and sustained by blinkered partisan commitments.
A serious, rigorous contribution to the debate over how to rescue a drowning middle class.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4942-5460-5
Page Count: 292
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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