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 Chapter 14 we saw how the renewed dynamism and appparent stabilisation of the world capitalist economy influenced Marxian analysis in the 1920s. Orthodox social democrats like Kautsky and Hilferding stole the clothes of the earlier revisionists to argue that, in the epoch of ‘organised capitalism’, major economic crises had become improbable. Against them were ranged a handful of neo-Luxemburgists (most prominently Fritz Sternberg) who continued to assert the inevitability of a realisation crisis, and the Trotskyists, stridently insisted upon the impending necessity of further imperialist wars (see Chapters 14 and 15 above). One common strand unites these otherwise disparate schools of thought. This is their almost total neglect of volume III of Marx’s Capital, and in particular of the tendency identified there for the rate of profit to decline. An important element in modern Marxian discussions of crises was thus almost entirely lacking.1 This chapter is concerned with the first serious attempt by a Marxist to develop the volume III analysis and apply it to crisis theory. Deeply flawed, it nevertheless proved to be (in the long run) extremely influential.

Henryk Grossmann and the Breakdown of Capitalism

Value, Competition, and Exploitation: Marx’s Legacy Revisited by Jonathan F. Cogliano, Peter Flaschel, Reiner Franke, Nils Frölich, and Roberto Veneziani

Regional Income Disparities in Australia and the European Community

As we indicated in the previous chapter, the impact of Sraffa’s The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities was by no means immediate. The initial effect was to generate an attack upon neoclassical theory, which resulted in the ‘Cambridge Controversies’ of the mid-1960s. Although this was relevant to the Marxian analysis of ‘vulgar economy’, it did not bear upon the logical coherence of Marxian political economy itself, and it was not until the 1970s that the direct implications for Marxian economics began to be appreciated. Meanwhile, the questions raised by Francis Seton and Paul Samuelson in the 1950s awaited answers (see Chapter 12 above). It remained to be seen whether Samuelson’s conclusions could be generalised to an n-sector model, and whether (as Engels and others had supposed) the transformation of values into prices of production could legitimately be regarded as a historical as well as a logical process (see volume I of this book, Chapter 3, section II). Also unresolved were important methodological issues concerning the role of mathematical models in the appraisal of Marxian value theory, and the relative significance of the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the problem.

John E. King

Papers

Henryk Grossmann and the Breakdown of Capitalism

Value, Competition, and Exploitation: Marx’s Legacy Revisited by Jonathan F. Cogliano, Peter Flaschel, Reiner Franke, Nils Frölich, and Roberto Veneziani

Regional Income Disparities in Australia and the European Community

Marxian Value Theory After Sraffa

Otto Neurath and the History of Economics