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

After 1907 the divisions within the SPD became more and more apparent. The right wing of the party, although always in the minority, advanced the revisionist case with increasing confidence against the left, whose belief in the inevitability of economic breakdown contributed greatly to their revolutionary political perspective. The central ground was occupied (at the theoretical level) by Kautsky and Hilferding. As we saw in the previous chapter, Kautsky’s centrism was increasingly slanted towards the right. Thus the left’s attack on class collaboration and the illusion of peaceful social change was directed against Kautsky himself.

Capital Accumulation, Imperialism and War: Rosa Luxemburg and Otto Bauer

Karl Marx died on 13 March 1883 at the age of 64, leaving much of his intended political economy unwritten and an even greater proportion unpublished. Since the publication of volume I of Capital in 1867, he had worked only sporadically on the remaining volumes, devoting an increasing proportion of his time to his other intellectual interests (for a discussion of some of these, see Chapter 7 below). The manuscripts which were to form the basis of the second, third and fourth volumes were subjected-as he once put it, regarding a different work — to ‘the gnawing criticism of the mice’. In view of the central political importance that he assigned to the economic analysis of capitalism, Marx’s lethargy was most unfortunate. Even allowing for the effects of ill health, it is difficult not to convict him of neglecting his responsibilities, both to the international socialist movement whose mentor he aspired to be, and more especially to his lifelong friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, who was left to pick up the pieces.

Friedrich Engels and the Marxian Legacy, 1883–95

This part is devoted to the Marxian theories of value and exploitation. It tells, as simply as we have been able to tell, a very long and complicated story. Readers should be warned that the structure of this part of the book is somewhat unusual. It contains two chapters (12 and 14) which are broadly chronological in their discussion of the transformation of values into prices of production, and two on Srafian economics (13 and 15) which are largely analytical in nature and deal only incidentally with the evolution of ideas over time. This division of the subject-matter is admittedly rather awkward, and necessarily involves some repetition. It seems, however, to be an inescapable consequence of the material with which we are concerned.

Value Theory Before Sraffa

Review(s) of: Equilibrium and evolution: Alfred Marshall and the Marshallians, by Neil Hart, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2012; xiii + 242 pp., 9780230302709, 65 pounds.

Book Review: Equilibrium and Evolution: Alfred Marshall and the Marshallians:

In the preface to the first volume of Capital, Marx had written: ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.’1 Both Plekhanov and Lenin adhered to this perspective, as we have seen in Chapters 8 and 11. Their economics focused upon the development of Russian capitalism from the relations of commodity production — thereby following the structure of Capital itself— and their political strategies were each geared to accelerating the Westernisation of Russia. By contrast, Leon Trotsky denied Marx’s claim.2 He did so by formulating a political economy which brought him closer than any other theorist to understanding the structure and contradictions of tsarist modernisation, and thus the nature of the Russian revolutionary process. Trotsky integrated ideas which had first made their appearance in populism with the concepts of Marxism to argue that neither the past nor the future path of Russia could follow the tracks of the advanced West.

John E. King

Papers

Capital Accumulation, Imperialism and War: Rosa Luxemburg and Otto Bauer

Friedrich Engels and the Marxian Legacy, 1883–95

Value Theory Before Sraffa

Book Review: Equilibrium and Evolution: Alfred Marshall and the Marshallians:

Trotsky on Uneven and Combined Development