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

Planning for Abundance: Nicholas Kaldor and Joan Robinson on the Socialist Reconstruction of Britain, 1942-45

In this article we identify three key reasons for considering Kalecki's work within the context of debates about post-Keynesian economics and critical realism. We then use six criteria to assess whether his work is consistent with a critical realist approach to empirical research and theory development. We conclude that Kalecki's work fits within the tenets of critical realism and provides insights for those wishing to include formal modelling and econometric techniques within a critical realist framework. Copyright The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Michal Kalecki and critical realism

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

In 1938 Barbara Wootton published Lament For Economics, an indictment of the state of contemporary economic theory. She complained that economics was of no use to anyone, and unintelligible to all except a small minority of specialists. Economists were unable to agree; they ignored reality, and often served as apologists for capitalism. Thus, economics was not a science, and could contribute little or nothing either to the understanding of capitalism or to the organisation of a future socialist society. Wootton’s criticism made no impact at the time, and she soon abandoned economics and became an eminent criminologist and social theorist. However, many of her arguments were repeated, 62 years later, in the French students’ manifesto that led to the formation of the Post Austistic Economics movement.

John E. King

Papers

Planning for Abundance: Nicholas Kaldor and Joan Robinson on the Socialist Reconstruction of Britain, 1942-45

Michal Kalecki and critical realism

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

Lament for economics, or how barbara wootton gave it all away and became a sociologist

Non‐Marxian Socialism