But Friedman is generally enthusiastic about world-changing trends such as just-in-time inventorying, supply-chaining and...
Of globalism and its contented.
New York Times columnist Friedman (Longitudes and Attitudes, 2002, etc.), always glad to find possibilities for hope in the most tangled international trends, offers a mantra to accompany the outsourcing of jobs in the brave new transnational capitalist world: “The playing field is being leveled. . . . The playing field is being leveled.” The phrase is that of a Bangalore-based captain of industry; Friedman’s gloss, which seems merely rhetorical at first but turns out to have some legs, is: “the world is flat.” Which is to say: new communications technologies and business strategies have erased certain obstacles between nations and peoples in at least the realms of knowledge work and intellectual capital. India, for instance, graduates huge numbers of accountants each year who can readily be put to work doing the grunt labor of preparing Americans’ tax returns, leaving it to the erstwhile U.S. preparer to do something wonderful and meaningful with his or her time—estate planning, say, or portfolio management. Friedman is sober-minded enough to recognize, of course, that not all homegrown preparers are Warren Buffetts in the making, and that some people will not thrive when their jobs wander across the oceans—though some may wind up in the Colorado phone bank that, Friedman seems most impressed to learn, processes drive-through orders for a McDonald’s franchise two states away. He is also quick to remark that the freer flow of information from developed to developing nation is a boon not just for the talented of the Third World, but also for the likes of certain bad guys: “Globalization in general,” he writes, “has been al-Qaeda’s friend in that it has helped to solidify a revival of Muslim identity and solidarity . . . thanks to the Internet and satellite television.”
But Friedman is generally enthusiastic about world-changing trends such as just-in-time inventorying, supply-chaining and insourcing. Those who look forward to a planet of Wal-Marts and Dells will be charmed. Those who don’t—well, welcome to the flat world.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-29288-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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