One dimensional man

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century Thomas L. Friedman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 Thomas Friedman is a widely-acclaimed journalist, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, and author of four best-selling books that include From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989). His eminence as a journalist is clearly demonstrated in the way he prepared for The World is Flat. He traveled throughout the world, interviewing in depth the political and business leaders who have the most direct, hands-on knowledge of the truly incredible developments occurring in the business structures and technology of globalization. Only a journalist who moves freely at the highest levels could interview the likes of Sir John Rose, the chief executive of Rolls-Royce; Nobuyuki Idei, the chairman of Sony; Richard Koo, the chief economist for the Nomura Research Institute; Bill Gates of Microsoft; Wee Theng Tan, the president of Intel China; David Baltimore, president of Caltech; Howard Schultz, founder and chairman of Starbucks; Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys in Bangalore - and many others, each of whom gave him the inside story of how, specifically, the barriers of time and space separating economies, workforces, sources of capital, and technical abilities are crumbling. The result of this unfolding story, already far along but with much farther to go, according to Friedman, is that "the world is flat." With some notable exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic swathe, everything is connected with everything else on a horizontal basis, with distance and erstwhile time-lags no longer mattering. Friedman describes in detail the galloping globalization that has unfolded in even so limited a time as the past five years. Under the impetus of a worldwide network of interconnectivity, the world economy is much-changed from what it was at the turn of the century a mere half-decade ago. Friedman quotes the CEO of India's Infosys: "What happened over the last [few] years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables," while (Friedman paraphrases him) "computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of software - e-mail, search engines like Google, and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore, and one part to Beijing...." Microprocessors today have 410 million transistors compared to the 2800 they had in 1971. And now, "wireless is what will allow you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere." The effect on productivity is revolutionary: "It now takes Boeing eleven days to build a 737, down from twenty-eight days just a few years ago. Boeing will build the next generation of planes in three days, because all the parts are computer-designed for assembly." The most strikingly informative aspect of this book, however, is not about technology. Most especially, Friedman explores the rapidly evolving global business systems, each constantly regenerating itself to keep ahead of the others. These are systems that span the continents seeking the lowest-cost providers of everything from expert scientific and engineering work to the lowliest grunt work. Friedman points out that India produces 70,000 accounting graduates each year - and that they are willing to start at $100 a month. It is no wonder that Boeing employs 800 Russian scientists and engineers for passenger-plane design when "a U.S. aeronautical engineer costs $120 per design hour, a Russian costs about one-third of that." Friedman describes a call center in India where outbound callers sell "everything from credit cards to phone minutes," while operators taking inbound calls do "everything from tracing lost luggage for U.S. and European airline passengers to solving computer problems for confused American consumers. …

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process.

(1975). The Limits of Organization. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 543-544.

The Limits of Organization

The History of Economic Analysis

In this paper i discuss the origin of the concept, between 1930 and 1933, in the writings of L.F. Giblin, R.F. Kahn, Roy Harrold and Michal Kalecki. Of the four, i argue, Kalecki's treatment of the export multiplier is most interesting, not least because he anticipated much more recent analyses of the balance of payments constraint on economic growth.

From Giblin to Kalecki: The Export Multiplier and the Balance of Payments Constraint on Economic Growth, 1930-1933

Kurt Rothschild was born in Vienna in 1914. In 1938 he came to Glasgow as a refugee from the Nazis, and taught there until his return to Austria in 1947. Between 1947 and 1966 he was a researcher at the Austrian Economic Research Institute in Vienna (WIFO), specialising in labour market and trade issues; he still works for WIFO as a consultant. From 1966 until 1985 he was Professor of Economics at the University of Linz. Two volumes of his collected papers appeared in the 1990s (Rothschild, 1993, 1995). His recent publications include Rothschild (2004a, 2004b, 2006, 2007a, 2007b). This interview took place in Vienna on 1 November 2007.

A Conversation with Kurt Rothschild

The Commonwealth Government's Intergenerational Report 2002-03 claims that Australia's ageing population poses a serious challenge for responsible fiscal policy in the longer term, a claim repeated in subsequent official pronouncements. We reject this claim, pointing to its rhetorical nature and to the lack of systematic sensitivity analysis of many of the critical variables. We conclude that the ageing 'crisis' is largely mythical.

Crisis?: What Crisis? - Myth and Reality in the Debate on an Ageing Australia

The article analyses Kaldor’s ideas on economic policy, his interest in policy issues, and his contribution on specific policies. It underlines Kaldor’s strong and cogent views on three main topics: monetary and fiscal policy, the control of cost inflation, and the stabilisation of commodity prices. The author suggests how Kaldor might have reacted to the most important economic policy questions that still face Britain and the European Union, thirty years after his death. Kaldor was a prominent opponent of Britain’s entry into the then Common Market in the 1970s: not on the basis of any emotive English nationalism, but rather because he believed that the British economy would be damaged by an exposure to unlimited competition from more successful European industries. Perhaps he would have argued that, by 2016, the damage has already been done, and that Britain should now remain in the Union to continue the fight for more sensible macroeconomic policies. He would certainly have been pleased that his adoptive country had refused to join the Eurozone.  JEL: B31; E61; E52

John E. King

Papers

From Giblin to Kalecki: The Export Multiplier and the Balance of Payments Constraint on Economic Growth, 1930-1933

A Conversation with Kurt Rothschild

Crisis?: What Crisis? - Myth and Reality in the Debate on an Ageing Australia

Nicholas Kaldor after thirty years

Kaldor and the Kaldorians