Book Description
Journalist Doug Henwood's withering postmortem of the New Economy.
Rarely a day went by in the dizzy 1990s without some well-paid pundit heralding the triumphant arrival of a "New Economy." According to these financial mavens, an unprecedented technological and organizational revolution had extinguished the threat of recession forever. Though much of the rhetoric sounds ridiculous today, few analysts have explored how the New Economy moment emerged from deep within America's economic and ideological machinery—instead, they've preferred to treat it as an episode of mass delusion.
Now, with customary irreverence and acuity, journalist Doug Henwood dissects the New Economy, arguing that the delirious optimism was actually a manic set of variations on ancient themes, all promoted from the highest of places. Claims of New Eras have plenty of historical precedents; in this latest act, our modern mythmakers held that technology would overturn hierarchies, democratizing information and finance and leading inexorably to a virtual social revolution. But, as Henwood vividly demonstrates, the gap between rich and poor has never been so wide, wealth never so concentrated. After the New Economy offers an accessible and entertaining account of the less-than-lustrous reality beneath the gloss of the 1990s boom.
Customer Reviews:
excellent.......2005-07-27
This is the excellent kind of economic and business journalism that we expect from Doug Henwood. See his LEFT BUSINESS OBSERVER. It's all about the end of the dream -- or rather hype -- of the so-called "new economy." Henwood writes really well and this book is not for professional economists or business-types. It's readily available to anyone who is interested in the topic.
Bored before he even began.......2004-07-29
What are we supposed to think of a self-appointed 'leftist' economics journalist who left the entire Enron story to the mainstream press? Perhaps if Henwood hadn't taken so long to write this book, it might have been relevant and timely as a recycling of older material on the Wall Street bubble (which he covered in his previous book) tied in with 'new economy' hype. As it is, it's neither. OTOH, maybe the story that Henwood wants to tell hasn't really unfolded yet. Google's inflated IPO value in 2004 indicates that the new economy is still all hype and blather, while the value of US equity markets still screams OVERVALUED. But this book isn't billed as futurology, so one star.
In any case, the lesson for Henwood the leftist and author should be clear: purge yourself of real left associations, and you still can't impress the journalistic mainstream in places like Forbes. However, purge yourself of real left associations, and real leftists get pretty sick of you after about one book.
Finally, it seems that what some mean by a term like 'new economy' and what others mean, unsurprisingly, are far different things. Henwood links the new economy with Wall Street, but much of the new economy for people like the pro-war elements of the Republican party doesn't need Wall Street so much as it needs the federal government. Their new new economy is built around entities like Carlyle Group, a private equity outfit that has huge holdings in companies that basically specialize in federal contracts, including but not exclusive to military spending. Their new new economy is also based on companies like SAIC or Halliburton running all aspects of their war and occupation of Iraq.
The Ironies of the Nineties.......2004-02-11
Henwood does a superb job of illuminating many of the ironies of the Ninties, whether simply quoting George Gilder (who Henwood notes, rivals Whitman as an exuberant list-maker) or pointing out that the phrase "New Economy" was first used by President Reagan in a speech at Moscow State University.
Too good to be true--but it is.
And Henwood underlines how, from the very beginning, the New Economy rested on a flight from the physical world. He quotes Reagan: "In the new eocnomy human invention increasingly makes natural resources obsolete."
While the Bush admnistration's environmental policy could be read as an attempt to fulfill Reagan's dream, world markets are now telling us that natural resources are far from out of vogue. Copper, gold, silver, oil, wheat--today, this is where wealth resides. Demand for these resources is rising in parts of the world where higher productivity actually means higher standards of living for a significant number of people.
By contrast, Henwood shows how, in the West,the productivity revolution of the Nineties produced more, always more, of things that, in many cases, we don't need and couldn't afford.The miracle? They were doing it with fewer people. Jobs vanish (though Henwood shows, low-wage jobs are growing at nice clip), debt mounts, the dollar declines.
And, he notes, in some cases what we produce may even lower the standard of living: "The contribution of the brokerage industry to productivity was mainly web-based trading; how much it contributes to human welfare is debatable. The more people trade, the worse they do (though it makes their brokers happier.)"
Henwood deconstructs GDP, and productivity numbers emphasizing the "statistical fetishism" surrounding both, asking important questions about the quality rather than just the quantity of what is produced (does it offer a gain for human possibilities or a loss?) and offering perhaps the clearest explanation I have seen of the fuzzy math involved in guesstimating both GDP and productivity growth.
Finally, in just a few pages he offers a fine analysis of how "so much of the last twenty years comes together in the Enron story . . . Lay's assetless trading model was right in line with the celebration of postmateriality. The pension system was right in line with New Era pension thinking. And relying on the stock market to judget he company and pay senior managers was right in line with all of the trendy talk from professors and consultants. And it all went badly wrong." Here, Henwood makes what may be his most important point: "But instead of being read as a judgment on the idiocy of all these fashions, it's being read as a case of personal corruption . . . " Our obsessive focus on crime--and putting the perps in jail--may be emotionally satisfying for some, but it too-neatly dodges the heart of the problem. The real problem was not that individuals corrupted the system--the real problem was that the ideology of the new paradigm was, itself, bankrupt.
Yet that ideology is still driving the U.S. economy. Just take a look at stock market valuations--or, better yet, the President's Economic Report. But first read this book.
When the Whip Comes Down.......2004-01-25
For years, Doug Henwood's newsletter -- "Left Business Observer" -- has served as a corrective to the triumphalist nonsense that passes for business journalism in the U.S., (and just about everywhere else for that matter). Now, with AFTER THE NEW ECONOMY, Henwood, pithily exposes the flashy mummery behind the bubble economy of the late 90s.
Henwood's particularly good on the years leading up to the boom. He shows how the New Economy was whipped to a high froth with profits expropriated from American in the preceding two decades. Here's Henwood in his own words on the subject: "It's not hard to figure out what caused the fifteen-year profit boom (in the 80s and 90s) -- a reversal of the forces that produced the sixteen-year bust that preceded it. The conventional story is that excessively stimulative and indulgent government policies led to a great inflation, compounded by the oil-price shocks of 1973 and 1979." (Pg. 204)
"There's some truth to the standard story, but it also needs to be translated into political language. The long post-World War II boom had fed the expansion of the welfare state. The sting of unemployment was lessened and workers became progressively less docile. Wildcat strikes were spreading and factory workers were smoking pot on breaks and sabotaging the line. Internationally, the U.S. had lost the Vietnam ware and discovered that is conscript army was an undisciplined horde that was not shy about shooting commanding officers. The Third World was in broad rebellion, demanding global wealth redistribution and a new world economic order, a point that OPEC made forcefully in 1973 and 1979" (Pg. 204).
Henwood notes that it was at this time that the conservative movement, which had been fairly quiescent in the 50s and 60s, gained a new impetus as the ruling class began to feel the pinch and search around for an ideological tool to stem the rising democratic tide. It came to a head when the top 1% which had traditionally controlled about 40% of the wealth in the United States found their share reduced to approximately 20% in the early 70s (Pg. 121). The counterrevolution began in earnest. It was then that the Chicago School boys sharpened their neo-liberal apologia for capitalism, and their retooled 19th century theories were embraced by the denizens of the Business Roundtable, their friends in the Treasury Department and the White House. And so, in Henwood's words "...through benefit cutbacks by employers, outsourcing, speedup, permanent downsizing, cutbacks in regulation, the central-bank-led class war succeeded in more than doubling the profit rate for nonfinancial corporations between 1982 and 1997" (pg. 210).
Henwood is a numbers guy, and he uses them to debunk the capitalism's cheerleaders as well as its undisciplined detractors. Particularly refreshing is his analysis of the wooly-headed maunderings of the weird left who wish the turn the clock back to some imaginary proto-capitalist time where the nation state was the beneficent conduit of citizen's wishes and cultures were seamless, nurturing and healthy. These ideologues, he notes, are more than matched by those idealist economists who posit the existence of a perfect economic machine that someday (once the distortions of governments and people are eliminated) will bring forth a new millenium.
Henwood knows every move of that great unregenerate beast, and shows how it grows more red in tooth and claw with every upper-class tax cut, every gutted education and healthcare program, every downsized and rightsized American worker. Yet, admirably, in the midst of all the darkness, Henwood strikes sparks of furious, wicked laughter.
Great Book - Now Let's Take it to the Street!.......2004-01-06
Henwood is a writer I admire and have long listened to on the radio -his analysis is always right on target and he has meticulously documented the sources of all the figures in this book, which make it a great starting place for anyone interested in getting a more sound understanding of where our economy is headed in the long-term.
The title is a bit misleading: it is really primarily about long-term trends in economics (he looks as far back as 1600) and how our economy today fits into a much bigger picture. The first chapter is devoted to debunking recent myths about "New Economy" - the dot-com bubble, and its subsequent burst. But the bulk of the book is really a sober, careful, hard look at the depressing truth about capitalism: it's a rotten system, always has been.
I fully agree with the reviewer here who criticized his chapter on "Globalization". He totally missed the mark with regard to the movement, which suggests to me that he isn't very involved in it himself. I'd rather he spent his time interviewing street activists at the protests than picking at obscure, irrelevant pamphlets he recieves in the mail. Then again, some of us are into the street theater, some aren't.
If it weren't for that chapter, I would be pushing this book on more of my activist friends, who undoubtedly have a kindred spirit in Henwood. A bit more of what Michael Moore has been smoking lately (i.e., an interest in real, ordinary folks and how they see the world) would definitely do Henwood some good.
Despite my frustrations, READ THIS BOOK!!!! It is VERY IMPORTANT!
Average customer rating:
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Living Wages, Equal Wages (Routledge Advances in Feministeconomics, 1)
Deborah Figart
Manufacturer: Routledge
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ASIN: 0415273900 |
Book Description
Wage setting has historically been a deeply political and cultural as well as economic process. This informative and accessible book explores how US wage regulations in the twentieth century took gender, race-ethnicity, and class into account. Focusing on social reform movements for living wages and equal wages, it offers an interdisciplinary account of how women's work and the remuneration for that work has changed along with the massive transformations in the economy and family structures.
The controversial issue of establishing living wages for all workers makes this book both a timely and indispensable contribution to this wide ranging debate, and it will surely become required reading for anyone with an interest in modern economic issues.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Economic Issues, published by Association for Evolutionary Economics on March 1, 2003. The length of the article is 834 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Living Wages, Equal Wages: Gender and Labor Market Policies in the United States. (Book Reviews).(Book Review) (book review)
Author: David H. Ciscel
Publication:
Journal of Economic Issues (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 2003
Publisher: Association for Evolutionary Economics
Volume: 37
Issue: 1
Page: 221(3)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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Water Dynamics in Plant Production (Cabi Publishing)
Wilfried Ehlers , and
Michael Goss
Manufacturer: CABI
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ASIN: 0851996949 |
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While there are many books available on plant nutrition and physiology and others on soil physics and hydrology, there are few that combine these subjects in one volume. This book aims to fill this gap in the literature by providing an integrated approach to water dynamics in plant and crop production. It is in part a translation of an earlier work in German by Dr Ehlers, which has been updated and expanded to include more international examples.
Book Description
New species are discovered every day -- and cataloguing all of them has grown into a nearly insurmountable task world-wide. Now, this definitive reference manual acts as a style guide for writing and filing species descriptions. New collecting techniques and new technology have led to a dramatic increase in the number of species that are discovered. Explorations of unstudied regions and new habitats for almost any group of organisms can result in a large number of new species discoveries -- and hence the need to be described. Yet there is no one source a student or researcher can readily consult to learn the basic practical aspects of taxonomic procedures.
Species description can present a variety of difficulties: Problems arise when new species are not given names because their discoverers do not know how to write a formal species description or when these species are poorly described. Biologists may also have to deal with nomenclatural problems created by previous workers or resulting from new information generated by their own research. This practical resource for scientists and students contains instructions and examples showing how to describe newly discovered species in both the animal and plant kingdoms.
With special chapters on publishing taxonomic papers and on ecology in species description, as well as sections covering subspecies, genus-level, and higher taxa descriptions, Describing Species enhances any writer's taxonomic projects, reports, checklists, floras, faunal surveys, revisions, monographs, or guides.
The volume is based on current versions of the International Codes of Zoological and Botanical Nomenclature and recognizes that systematics is a global and multicultural exercise. Though Describing Species has been written for an English-speaking audience, it is useful anywhere Taxonomy is spoken and will be a valuable tool for professionals and students in zoology, botany, ecology, paleontology, and other fields of biology.
Customer Reviews:
A good introduction.......2006-11-03
I am a graduate student in the biological sciences and I wanted a good, basic introduction to the taxonomic "process." This book provides just that in a readable, easy-to understand format. I want to emphasize the readable part, because if you've tried to read books about taxonomy or systematics, you know they can be a little, well, dense. Particularly helpful are Winston's relatively clear description of the conventions of Latin naming (is it -us, or -um, or -eae?) and excellent references at the end of each chapter. She provides information on both botanical and zoological naming conventions.
My only complaint regarding this book is the frequent use of marine invertebrates, bryozoans and such, as in-text examples. Unfortunately, I don't know anything about marine invertebrate taxonomy, and therefore, the examples don't do much to clarify the points being made because I am not familiar with the discipline-specific jargon. I hate to say it, but the examples would have been much clearer if she had chosen more familiar organisms.
Overall, this is a good book and I would recommend it to anyone who needs a primer on describing species.
Essential for a budding taxonomist.......2006-03-04
If you want to understand how to recognise a potential new species either from scratch or because you've spotted one in a group ascribed to another species, this book will tell you how from the botteom up - perhaps with an emphasis on plants and animals in particular. Highly suited to beginners with no taxonomic background, it guides the reader into the rituals and rules necessary - not just predicated upon the ivory towers of science, but on the practical need to understand and name species in the context of their use and in a conservation context. The book is holistic in that it brings together some history and anthropology of how people traditionally recognise species - this is not just a technical subject. Winston writes with skill, care and patient attention taking nothing for granted with lots of references. She encourages you warmly and whispers why this is important. She brings out her own experience. This is a wonderful book to buy for yourself or as a gift to a budding naturalist.
A good primer for "Describing Species".......2000-06-18
With the current biodiversity crisis and the need to describe the majority of the diversity of species on earth, this is an especially timely addition to the literature on alpha taxonomy (describing new species) which is approachable to the nonspecialist. Being an ecologist who must occasionally put pen to new species discovered in the course of field work, I would have loved to have had this book available while I was in graduate school.
Without too much depth, Winston walks (at times seeming to literally hold one's hand) non-taxonomists through the process of not only describing species that are new to science, but also the critical steps to ensure that the organism you are describing is actually new to science. Winston stresses the pitfalls of making this disastrous mistake as well as the intricacies of working with specialists at museums and universities who are necessary collaborators, at one level or another.
Two complaints with the book are a number of typographic errors, especially with incorrect articles (a, an, the) and that I think Winston could have more strongly stressed (1) the importance of examining material directly before deciding that something is indeed new and (2) the importance of complete synonymy (researching all the possible names that a particular species [or higher taxon] may have had in the past). This is hard work and is usually not as good as it should be to be useful for future researchers.
Having visited a number of museums during the course of my work, I have found the curatorial staffs as well as the curators to be extremely helpful but I believe that they will all be appreciative if every nonspecialist who walks through their door has already read and mulled over the advice and procedures in Winston's book. Overall, a clear guide to a sometimes confusing and daunting task.
Describing Species: Practical Taxonomic Procedure for Biolog.......2000-05-01
Although far from being a Taxonomy for the Utterly Ignorant, Judith Winston's Describing Species provides a basic and thorough grounding in the history, concepts, and procedures of describing and naming species. The book is intended for [graduate] students, scholars, and researchers -- systematic biologists, palaeontologists, molecular biologists, biochemists, ecologists, et al. -- who want, or need, to research and publish taxonomic descriptions, and as such is not for those who have little to no knowledge of such matters. Although it does to some extent cover systematics as such, at least enough to provide a framework, it concentrates on taxonomy (that part of systematics that is concerned with description, naming, and classification of organisms) and is designed to be used as "a desk reference and guide to nomenclatural procedure and taxonomic writing", to use Winston's description from her preface, in the context of a course in systematics, or as a supplement to a systematics textbook. It even has a chapter ("Visiting Collections: What to Expect and How to Behave") on how to approach, and get along with, professional researchers -- a chapter that, mutatis mutandis, would be generally applicable to any student in any field. It walks the reader through the processes of diagnosis, description, writing, and publication, giving enough background and explanation to put each step in context of the larger picture (a why-to as opposed to merely a how-to, in other words), all in a professional yet informal style that makes the book very accessible as a whole -- even I, not a scientist but a thorough-going humanist (a stranger in a strange land, so to speak) seeking to increase my knowledge and understanding, found it comprehensible, albeit by no means easy. In addition, it offers many bibliographies for those who wish to delve more deeply. In short, with the caveat that (a) I am not a biologist and (b) this book is not for the utter neophyte, I would commend this book to the attention of those whose interest is professional or would-be professional, as well as to those who are interested in the field but are for whatever reason beyond the "for Dummies" (TM) level.
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Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
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