Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Vintage),Books,Free Shipping,0307277992,

	Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Vintage) by Robert B. Reich
	List Price $15.95 Our Price $10.85 You Save $5.10 (32%) Prices subject to change. Eligible for FREE Shipping See details Availability Usually ships in 24 hours
	Marketplace New from $8.99 Used from $10.45
Product Details Binding Paperback Dewey Decimal Number 331 EAN 9780307277992 ISBN 0307277992 Manufacturer Vintage Number Of Items 1 Number Of Pages 288 Publication Date September 09, 2008 Publisher Vintage Release Date September 09, 2008 Availability Usually ships in 24 hours Product Description From one of America's foremost economic and political thinkers comes a vital analysis of our new hypercompetitive and turbo-charged global economy and the effect it is having on American democracy. With his customary wit and insight, Reich shows how widening inequality of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and corporate corruption are merely the logical results of a system in which politicians are more beholden to the influence of business lobbyists than to the voters who elected them. Powerful and thought-provoking, Supercapitalism argues that a clear separation of politics and capitalism will foster an enviroment in which both business and government thrive, by putting capitalism in the service of democracy, and not the other way around. In this compelling and important analysis of the triumph of capitalism and the decline of democracy, former labor secretary Reich urges us to rebalance the roles of business and government. Power, he writes, has shifted away from us in our capacities as citizens and toward us as consumers and investors. While praising the spread of global capitalism, he laments that supercapitalism has brought with it alienation from politics and community. The solution: to separate capitalism from democracy, and guard the border between them. Plainspoken and forceful, if somewhat repetitious, the book urges new and strengthened laws and regulations to restore authority to the citizens in us. Reich's proposals are anything but knee-jerk liberal: he calls for abolishing the corporate income tax and labels the corporate social responsibility movement distracting and even counterproductive. As in 2004's Reason, Reich exhibits perhaps too much confidence in Americans' ability to think and act in their own best interests. But he refuses to shift blame for corporations' dominance to the usual suspects, instead pointing a finger at consumers like you and me who want better deals, and from investors like us who want better returns, he writes. Provocatively argued, this book could help begin a necessary national conversation. (Sept. 6) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Reich, professor of public policy and former secretary of labor, argues that as the U.S. has grown stronger as a capitalist economy, it has grown weaker as a democratic nation. Reich begins by looking at the political and economic history that has contributed to the particular brand of capitalism and democracy practiced in the U.S. and how democracy is threatened as more and more Americans are engrossed in their roles as consumers and investors and less so as citizens. He recalls the 'almost Golden Age' of the 1950s, a period of stability as large corporations, big labor, and government managed the interests of consumers, workers, management, and investors for the 'common good.' The spread of capitalism to a global level hasn't corresponded with a spread of democracy throughout the world and has led to some negative social consequences at home, including widening inequalities and a shrinking social safety net. Reich asserts that although Americans dislike what lower wages are doing to us as a nation, when weighed against lower prices or higher return on investments, we vacillate or look the other way. Reich uses tables and charts and plain speech to describe how the economy has grown so efficient and effective that the human equation is lost and how the democracy has become less and less responsive to common values. As citizens, we need to 'make our purchases and investments a social choice as well as a personal one,' Reich maintains. Bush, Vanessa “Smart and provocative . . . Reich’s proposed responses to supercapitalism are at once bold and surprising . . . [he] challenges us to think deeply about political economy.” -News & Observer “The book succeeds brilliantly. Clear-eyed, well-reasoned, and deeply insightful, Supercapitalism is must reading for anyone interested in the fate of our country and its institutions . . . timely and important reading for a country in deep distress.” -Kansas.com “Critically important . . . the value of this book isn’t in proposing a specific policy prescription. It’s about waking up and educating several generations of Americans who can’t seem to understand that you can’t have it all for free . . . It’s the most important message anyone can impart today.” -San Francisco Bay Guardian “A grand debunking of the conventional wisdom . . . the main thrust of Reich’s argument is right on target . . Reich documents in lurid detail the explosive growth of corporate lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions since the 1970s.” -The New York Times Book Review “Reich is that most exotic of species: an economist who can write.” -San Francisco magazine “Supercapitalism is not a polemic or a call to arms. Reich is merely trying to dent capitalism’s rock-star status while suggesting to a dazed citizenry that, as Shakespeare said of Caesar’s Rome, the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves.” -San Francisco Chronicle “Surprising . . . Reich paints a disturbing portrait of a world in which corporations have become our quasi-government.” -Sunday Star-Ledger “An engaging and insightful account.” -Harvard Business Review From the Hardcover edition. 'Reich documents in lurid detail the explosive growth of coporate lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions since the 1970s. . . . Supercapitalism is a grand debunking of the conventional wisdom in the style of John Kenneth Galbraith.' —The New York Times 'Reich turns the standard liberal critique of corporations on its head.' —Forbes 'A thoughtful and heartfelt critique of the ruthless, hell-bent-for-profit brand of capitalism that has been in vogue under Democrats and Republicans alike since roughly the end of the cold war.' —Portfolio 'Supercapitalism describes important and sweeping economic changes. . . . Reich has a talent for making economics accessible and sometimes even fun.' —The Los Angeles Times From one of America's foremost economic and political thinkers comes a vital analysis of our new hypercompetitive and turbo-charged global economy and the effect it is having on American democracy. With his customary wit and insight, Reich shows how widening inequality of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and corporate corruption are merely the logical results of a system in which politicians are more beholden to the influence of business lobbyists than to the voters who elected them. Powerful and thought-provoking, Supercapitalism argues that a clear separation of politics and capitalism will foster an enviroment in which both business and government thrive, by putting capitalism in the service of democracy, and not the other way around. Robert B. Reich is professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He last served in government as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He contributes weekly commentaries to Marketplace on public radio, appears regularly on television, and is a cofounding editor of The American Prospect. In 2003 Reich was awarded the prestigious Václav Havel Foundation Prize for pioneering work in economic and social thought. He lives in Berkeley, California. Chapter One: The Not Quite Golden Age Roughly between 1945 and 1975, America struck a remarkable accommodation between capitalism and democracy. It combined a hugely productive economic system with a broadly responsive and widely admired political system. America in those years achieved its highest degree of income equality (since measurements have been available). It generated a larger proportion of good-paying jobs than before or since, and more economic security than ever for more of its people. Perhaps not coincidentally, in those years Americans also expressed high confidence in democracy and trust in government, both of which sharply declined in subsequent years.[1] That singular success and that powerful promise extended the moral authority of the American system throughout the world. In contrast to Soviet communism, America became an exemplar of both political freedom and suburban middle-class affluence. The economy was based on mass production. Mass production was profitable because a large middle class had enough money to purchase what could be mass-produced. The middle class had the money because the profits from mass production were divided up between the giant corporations and their suppliers, retailers, and employees. The bargaining power of these latter groups was enhanced and enforced by government action. Almost a third of the workforce belonged to a labor union. Economic benefits were also spread across the nation—to farmers, veterans, smaller towns, and small businesses—through regulation (of railroads, telephones, utilities, and energy supplies) and subsidy (price supports, highways, federal loans). Thus did democracy offset the economic power of large-scale production and widely disperse its benefits. But it was not quite a golden age. Women and minorities still struggled for political equality and economic opportunity. Much of the nation’s poverty was hidden away in rural hollows or black ghettos. Foreign policy, ostensibly shaped by the perceived threat of Soviet communism, all too frequently pandered to the needs of large American firms for cheap raw materials abroad, such as bananas, tin, and oil. Civil liberties were imperiled during Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt. Much of American life was monotonous, conformist, and deadly dull. And yet for all its shortcomings, democratic capitalism seemed to be working remarkably well, and on the way to working even better. In order to understand what happened to the Not Quite Golden Age, we first need to understand how it came about. The evolution began as the nineteenth century ended, when large corporations posed a profound challenge to American democracy. They brought a new level of prosperity to the nation but also sweatshops, child labor, and unsafe working conditions, and they monopolized whole industries. The unprecedented economic power of these giant companies made them politically unaccountable. America groped for a way to respond. It started with outsized personalities whose footprints are still visible—J. P. Morgan, a banker’s son who sold stocks for the railroads, engineered a huge rail combination, and became a wealthy financier (J. P. Morgan and Sons, which evolved into today’s Morgan Stanley); Andrew Carnegie, who began as a telephone clerk, rose to the presidency of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and then made a fortune as a steel magnate (Carnegie Steel); John D. Rockefeller, who started as a bookkeeper in Cleveland, bought his first oil refinery in 1862, cornered the oil market in the 1890s with his Standard Oil Company (whose descendant is ExxonMobil), and then moved into coal, iron, shipping, copper, and banking (Chase Manhattan); and, subsequently, Henry Ford. With these men and others like them flowed a stream of new inventions—steam engines, railway locomotives, the telegraph, electric turbines, internal combustion engines, and iron and steel machinery with interchangeable parts—that allowed all sorts of things to be made and shipped in very large volume. Costs could be spread over so many units that each single one was cheap to produce. Procter & Gamble devised a new machine for mass-producing Ivory soap. Diamond Match used a machine that made and boxed matches by the billions. A cigarette-making machine invented in 1881 was so productive that just fifteen of them satisfied America’s annual demand for cigarettes. Standard Oil, American Sugar Refining, International Harvester, and Carnegie Steel, among others, gained unprecedented efficiencies through giant furnaces, whirling centrifuges, converters, and rolling and finishing equipment. Productivity surged. While the typical American worker in the early 1800s had produced a tiny .3 percent more each year (seeding and harvesting crops, logging, fishing, or applying his craft with hand tools), by the last decades of the century his productivity was rising at six times that rate.[2] Output also exploded. Iron production doubled in just a few years; steel production multiplied twenty-fold.[3] Railroad and telegraph networks expanded in tandem. Fast, regular, and reliable transportation and communication brought raw materials from far corners of the country into factories and sent finished goods out to wholesalers and retailers all over the nation. An economic revolution on this scale inevitably had large social consequence. Supply outran demand, leading to a severe depression that jolted much of Europe and America in 1873. Another depression in the summer of 1893 impoverished thousands of farmers, closed banks, and left more than a quarter of America’s unskilled urban workforce unemployed. A growing chorus of socialists in Europe and America proclaimed the imminent collapse of capitalism. A swelling cadre of western populists in deepening debt to eastern bankers demanded that currencies be converted from gold to silver. With silver far more abundant than gold, this would inflate currency values and thereby shrink the debts. Manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic wanted higher tariffs to protect themselves from foreign imports. (Only Britain, whose advanced manufacturers were the primary beneficiaries of free trade, declined to raise its tariffs, resulting in what were seen there as German and American “economic invasions.”)[4] Hundreds of thousands of people moved from farms to factories. In 1870, fewer than 8 percent of America’s adult population worked in a mill and only one in five lived in a place with 8,000 or more inhabitants; a half century later, almost a third were in factories and almost a half lived in cities. During this tumultuous span of time, New York City’s population swelled fourfold; Chicago became ten times its former size. In the 1870s, 280,000 immigrants entered the United States each year. In the 1880s, 5.5 million came; in the 1890s, another 4 million. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the flow of immigrants, most of them destitute when they arrived, rose to a million a year. According to a 1908 government study, almost three-fifths of the wage earners in principal branches of American industry had been born abroad.[5] Immigrants then constituted a higher percentage of the total American workforce than they would a hundred years hence. As America and every other manufacturing nation began scouring more backward regions of the globe for potential markets, the term “imperialism” entered common speech. Teddy Roosevelt asserted America’s imperial destiny in Latin America.“Territorial expansion,” explained an official of the United States State Department in 1900, “is but the by-product of the expansion of commerce.”[6] Britain and Germany equated their economic prowess with their nations’ global spheres of influence. The British economist J. A. Hobson dourly predicted the logical end-point of such competition: Businessmen, he warned, opt for war when they have exhausted their home markets. Like John Maynard Keynes three decades later, Hobson urged instead that advanced nations increase their domestic markets by making more of their citizens rich enough to buy domestically produced goods. “If apportionment of incomes were such as to evoke no excessive saving, full constant employment for capital and labor would be furnished at home.”[7] But the world war Hobson feared would occur before enough citizens had the wherewithal to buy a substantial portion of what they produced. In the first decades of the twentieth century, productivity again surged. Sweatshops and mills were replaced by large manufacturing plants, inspired by Frederick Winslow Taylor’s new theories of “scientific management,” which broke down every factory job into highly specialized and repetitive steps. Henry Ford’s assembly line became the model. Not only could workers positioned along the line produce more cars in a shorter time but production could be concentrated in a few giant factories and materials could be bought in bulk at great savings. In 1909, Ford produced 10,607 cars; in 1913, 168,000; the following year, 248,000. By the beginning of World War I, much of American industry had consolidated into giant firms whose names became almost synonymous with America—Ford Motor, U.S. Steel, American Telephone & Telegraph, United States Rubber, National Biscuit, American Can, the Aluminum Company of America, General Electric, General Motors, and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. The size of such enterprises became an almost impregnable barrier to entry. They dominated the American, and much of the world’s, economy for most of the twentieth century. Of the Fortune 500 largest corporations in 1994, more than half were founded between 1880 and 1930.[8] A far smaller portion was founded during the long stable period between 1945 and 1975, an important fact to bear in mind as the story unfolds. Notes [1] The most useful polling series of American attitudes toward government is T... Robert Reich's latest book is a wide-ranging discussion of the role of global corporations in today's democracy. Narrator Dick Hill sounds like he's stepped into the skin of the author as he mimics the former secretary of labor's conversational style, professorial expertise, and subtle humor. The energy of the reading is infectious, allowing the listener to take on ideas that might be new--such as the possibility that corporate social responsibility is diversionary and the today's American consumer might have a better deal than today's American citizen. Refreshingly, neither the narrator nor the author gets bogged down in taking himself too seriously--as do many political/economic commentators these days. R.M. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine Customers who bought this item also bought The Conscience of a Liberal The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism The Post-American World The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America Customer Reviews for: Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Vintage) Rating - Allow me to be unconvinced Reich suggests that economic history after 1945 can be divided in two phases: the "almost Golden Age" and the ensuing phase of "super capitalism'. They roughly correspond with the age of mass-production/culture and the following period of diversification, long tail, etc. The move from one to the other is, according to Reich, caused by the introduction of technological innovations created during the cold war. It is - as with every historical thesis ... Read More Rating - Enjoyable, Accessible Read on a Sound SocioEconomic Thesis thoughtful, well-written thesis on how we as americans fill various relationships in the economy, society and our democracy (ie. we are "investors," "consumers" and "citizens")...most often, in the modern global economy ("supercapitalism"), we as citizens, even with our democratic voices, lose out to the forces of investing & consuming. Reich isn't apologetic about this - he just states it in a factual manner that really does make simple sense. Rating - So-so, but you're better off with the NeoMarxists if you want to learn about this topic. I'm a longtime fan of Reich's pieces on NPR's Marketplace and bought this book thinking it would be of a similar bent. I was mistaken. Reich does a mediocre job of leading the reader through the forces that created the current economic climate and his views of global capitalism are simplistic at best. If you want to read up on the effects of globalization, try the Neo-Marxist writings of Frederic Jameson, David Harvey, and of course, Karl Marx. Rating - Refreshing, Clear, and Challenging Robert Reich's book is refreshing from a variety of perspectives. It is refreshing because he doesn't settle for cheap criticism or partisan sniping. It is refreshingly honest; he establishes a clear line of responsbility between citizen behavior and economic or social consequences, whether intended or unintended. His grasp of history and personal observations in government service are clearly stated and will, hopefully, serve as the basis for authentic ... Read More see more reviews See all books by author Robert B. Reich

Books : Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Vintage)