Get The Work Of Nations: Preparing Ourselves For 21st Century Capitalism Originated By Robert B. Reich Formatted As Paperback

Reich is the man hes committed his life to being an advocate for the working and middle classes, Blithering. Reich thinks the winners in society are winners because they "manipulate symbols, " No, Bob. The winners are winners because they've been cut in on the deal, Wealth goes to those with wealth, not those with exceptional skills: Talented programmers have their projects cancelled, their jobs outsourced to Asia.
Talented musicians starve. People go to college because they're wealthy, to a much greater degree than conversely,

If you want to know economics, read Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, Muhammad Yunus, Jack London sitelinkThe People of the Abyss, sitelinkThe Strength of the Strong.
Even Mark Twain, tongue far into cheek in sitelinkPolitical Economy, knows more of how the world works, More: sitelinkworldcat. org/profiles/Tom/lists/ Reich, writing in, argues that we don't think properly about economic priorities in the modern global age, being too stuck in metaphors or "vestigial thinking" as he calls it designed to describe systems of past generations.
He repeatedly argues that "The skills of a nation's work force and the quality of its infrastructure are what makes it unique, and uniquely attractive, in the world economy.
"Therefore, he challenges the idea that ownership should determine whether a company is "American" or not, Incidentally, these arguments are probably even more true today than then were nearly three decades ago,
While the examples, and there are a pile of them, may seem removed in time for us today, most of the discussion in the book is astonishingly relevant.
Reich covers much more ground than just economics, including the proper goals of education, what it means to be a nation, what it means for a product or company to be "American.
" He writes for instance:"Americanowned firms were doing so much abroad, and foreignowned firms so much here, that byAmerican consumers intent on improving the nation's trade balance would have done better to buy a Honda than a Pontiac Le Mans.
"

I enjoyed some of his discussion on education very much, I used the following passages to discuss with my children the goals of science labs and English papers, Reich identifies the symbolicanalytic worker as the category as opposed to routine production services and inperson services as the worker with the most potential for value and growth.
"The formal education of an incipient symbolic analyst thus entails refining four basic skills: abstraction, system thinking, experimentation, and collaboration, "
"The student is taught to get behind the datato ask why certain facts have been selected, why they are assumed to be important, how they were deduced, and how they might be contradicted.
The student learns to examine reality from many angles, in different lights, and thus to visualize new possibilities and choices, The symbolicanalytic mind is trained to be skeptical, curious, and creative, "

There are some great discussions about the difference between consumption and investment when it comes to government spending, He sees money spent on infrastructure and education as investment and different altogether in value from most other budgetary lines, Good food for thought.

Reich is generally a very thoughtful and careful writer, But occasionally there are some fuzzy spots, such as when he says that "Inthe nation I believe he means congress decided that all students qualified to attend college should have access to higher education.
"

Despite documenting some of the foolish and unintended outcomes of government regulation and restriction of the market, he seems to have a very optimistic view of the good government can do.
He advocates "a kind of 'GATT for direct investment'"in which countries would voluntarily limit their sweet deals to corporations for the sake of the common good, which seems likely to me to be undermined in a thousand ways.
He has an unbounded confidence that money equals results in public education, And he believes that a properly progressive tax can solve nearly all the financial ills of any country, While he makes some important observations by extrapolating changes to the taxes of the wealthiest Americans out to their financial value over many years, I am confident that without strong boundaries on spending all that too could be piddled away by our national government.
He mentions the need for restraint with categories such as military, but his real passion is for a more progressive income tax.

While I found this book interesting, I found it slower going than many books, I believe that was in part due to the mountain of examples Reich references regarding his points,

A few more good quotes:
"Capitalism, unlike other ideologies, is indifferent to the beliefs or pedigrees of its practitioners so long as they contribute to the bottom line.
"

"It should be noted that the term "labor shortage" rarely means that workers cannot be found at any price, Its real meaning is that desired workers cannot be found at the price that employers and customers wish to pay, "
"The media carefully avoid complex explanations and context for fear that their harried listeners and readers will seek more entertaining diversion.

"We are, after all, citizens as well as economic actors we may work in markets but we live in societies, "
History offers ample warning of how zerosum nationalism, . . can corrode public values to the point

where citizens support policies which marginally improve their own welfare while harming everyone else on the planet.
. .
Technologies are not commodities for which world demand is finite, nor do they come in fixed quantities, . .
"Those who aim to reform the world in one fell sweep often have difficulty signing up credulous recruits, "
"Human capital, unlike physical of financial capital, has no inherent bounds, "Thisbook by Robert B, Reich, a political economist at Harvard and a reputable policy wonk, purports to be about economies and globalization but is in fact about new business models.
Reich lays out the case for globalization in a standard fashion and makes the case that American corporations aren't really American anymore no surprise at all to anyone who has worked in a multibillion dollar company recently.


Reich is filled up with words like "enterprise web" and "network", but these concepts are jaded to anyone who has been reading Fast Company and Wired Magazine over the lastyears in fact, Reich is a legacy of the dotcom bust generation.
In this we have the advantage over him, in that we can read his work looking for the hubris of the new economists.
'

Reich identifiesnew key players in the business world, These three are problem identifiers, problem solvers, and strategic brokers, He believes fervently that these three types of job holders will exist in the network or enterprise web as independent agents, making and shaking the world and being rewarded monetarily for it.
He, for some unfathomable reason, believes that these people will constitute a majority of the white collar workers, and that everyone else will work at commoditized jobs.
In other words, there will be some poor schmoes at the bottom whose access to the good life is increasingly marginalized, The view that the people and companies who actually deliver daytoday, not the next keen iPod or Futon, but the houses we live in, the education of our children, the gas we burn in our cars, the organic food we eat the view that these people are no longer economically important is ludicrous.


I'll keep the book because of the excellent first third that talks you through the rise of Nationalism in economic terms its good history.
Otherwise, this book is trendology or futurist prediction that misses the mark, .