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

The recession has apparently led to a surge of school-leavers applying to study economics at university [in the United Kingdom]. Applications were up by 15% in January, and similar increases have been recorded for school economics lessons for 16and 18-year-olds . . . One of the areas prospective economics students might care to study is why most economists failed to foresee the recession, and why those who did made not a blind bit of difference.

Economists and the global financial crisis

We outline the core claims of Basil Moore's book Horizontalists and Verticalists: The Macroeconomics of Credit Money and place them in their historical, contemporary and present contexts. Several theoretical problems raised by the book and recent developments in the operation of financial markets and monetary policy are discussed. We find that Moore is a key figure in the theory of endogenous money, but his version of the theory was viewed as radical and was by no means widely accepted. Recent developments have validated many of his ideas, which are now commonplace, but others remain unresolved and controversial.

Horizontalists and Verticalists after 25 years

This title contains a selection of articles on and by Nicholas Kaldor which concentrate on his theoretical and applied economics of growth. Part 1 features an autobiographical article by Kaldor, three biographical sketches, and a hitherto unpublished conversation with A.P. Thirlwall on Kaldorâ€™s life and work. Part 2 includes his early contributions to steady-state growth theory, including two of his best-known models, a number of critical appraisals, and Kaldorâ€™s replies. Part 3 deals with his long flirtation with Verdoornâ€™s Law, while the articles in Part 4 cover the last stage of Kaldorâ€™s thinking on growth and concentrate on world economy models of increasing returns and export-constrained growth.

Economic growth in theory and practice

What makes an established scholar question the foundations of his discipline, break with the great majority of his profession, and abandon a respected position in the scientific mainstream for the isolation and insecurity of the margins? What intellectual difficulties does such a heretic encounter, and how can they be overcome? These questions are posed very sharply by the career of Sidney Weintraub, who moved in the course of a few years after 1958 from being a distinguished practitioner of orthodox Keynesianismto become in effect the founder of Post Keynesian economics in the United States, suffering in the process a substantial drop in status, reputation, and influence. Born in Brooklyn in 1914, Weintraub' graduated from New York University, spending 1938-39 at the London School of Economics. Returning to the United States on the eve of the Second World War, he worked on his doctorate, on "Monopoly and the Economic System," which would have appeared as a book but for the untimely death of his prospective publisher in the war. Weintraub then entered the federal bureaucracy and subsequently enlisted in the army. After demobilization, he taught for several years at the (Catholic) St. John's University in New York before moving to the University of Pennsylvania in

John E. King

Papers

Economists and the global financial crisis

Horizontalists and Verticalists after 25 years

Economic growth in theory and practice

Sidney Weintraub: the genesis of an economic heretic

The Political Economy of the Living Wage: A Study of Four Cities