market-economics

My sincerest congratulations to Norman Kurland, Dawn Brohawn and Michael Greaney for authoring such an impressive book on Capital Homesteading and how it can avoid bankrupting the Social Security and radically improve the competitiveness of basic industries in America. I am very impressed at the comprehensivenes of this book in addressing through a more just free market system a whole host of economic problems that up to now, seemed to be hopeless. The book is also very timely in that I and other seaman of Oglebay Norton Marine Services recently formed an association called the Oglebay Norton Employee Economic Empowerment Association (ONEEEA) to initiate an employee buyout of the Great Lakes vessels owned by our financially ailing company. The Capital Homesteading book helped me tremendously to understand why many corporations are experiencing financial difficulties and why our economy is so unstable. It gives very clear reasons, scenarios and end results of why these problems exist, offers solutions to these problems and describes in great detail, the benefits of implementing the suggested solutions. I could not recommend a book more highly for educating all American workers and our leaders to the mess we are in. It really brought on a whole new understanding for me, why our present economic systems and corporations are failing and what kind of reforms are needed before it's too late. All of the suggested reforms for simplifying and restructuring the tax systems, governments, social security, credit availability, corporations, etc., seem to have a logic that makes it easy to understand. Many of the problems and failures in our economy that are described in this book in graphic detail, have come to roost in the corporation that I work for. The book makes it easy to see why we, as a group of employees, are so drammatically affected by flaws in our current economic policies. I believe that reading this book very carefully would help everyone to gain a better understanding of our economic problems of today. It is well worth the purchase price.

i found that book is very useful for me. it contains most important things about banking. and i need it.

Insofar from what I have read the book, I find it very challenging. It is not an easy book to read and master. One has to be willing to read again and again the assigned chapters to understand(especially chapter 1).But the material is very interesting. Thank you Ms. Allen!

"Capitalists Against Markets highlights the important role played by employers in the creation of the American and Swedish welfare states. In a brilliant and original analysis, Swenson shows how employer strategies--solidarism in Sweden and segmentalism in the U.S.--were rooted in each country's economic development and gave rise to distinctive public programs. The book takes on both rational choice and social democratic arguments: employers acted rationally, Swenson shows, but their choices were historically constrained and far from being reflexively anti-labor or anti-government, right down to the 1990s. Adroitly blending theory, history, and politics, Swenson has created a masterpiece of comparative scholarship. "

Sanford M. Jacoby, Anderson Graduate School of Management, UCLA

"Capitalists against Markets is a magnificent follow-up on the author's much acclaimed Fair Shares. In this new book, Peter Swenson proposes a much needed correction to the mainstream - and myopic - focus on the role of labor movements in the making of welfare politics. He offers both rich history and strong analysis of how capitalists helped give shape and form to the welfare state and to labor market policies in Sweden and the United States, two countries that exemplify the welfare state extremes. It is both impressive and path-breaking scholarship and it will no doubt provoke controversy. It certainly should, as it forces us social scientists to take the politics of capitalists far more seriously than has been our want."

Gosta Esping-Andersen, Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

"This is a book of great importance. Marshalling detailed historical evidence, Swenson persuasively challenges the view that employers were uniformly hostile to the creation of the welfare state by showing that this was untrue even in the United States. As an added bonus, it is quite a gripping read."

David Soskice, Research Professor of Political Science, Duke University

This was required reading at a job that I had. I have found that the principals taught in this book have applied at every job I have had since. I learned valuable insight into making my career and also life in general more productive.

First of all, this book is only a collection of journal papers. However, all of the chapters provide the complete understanding of the new science - chaos theory and its underlying assumption of nonlinearity. In my opinion, this book is the bible for anyone who want to study on this area.

This book contains an analysis of the economic and social effects of the Pinochet dictatorship by John Lear and Joseph Collins around 1990 and an epilogue by Stephanie Ronsenfeld from around 1994.

The authors show the effects of deregulation on all aspects of Chilean life. The public health system--which seventy percent of Chileans as of 1990 belonged to--has been rapidly defunded , farmed out to municipalities. Relatively few Chileans can afford the relatively new HMO-type companies whose primary focus is accomodating people who can pay the most i.e. the well-off. Thyphoid fever and Hepatitis rapidly expanded to epidemic proportions from the mid-70's until a decaded later--short term profit, absent government restraint, makes dumping industrial waste and chemicals into rivers into the water supply a reasonable cost-effective mean as does neglecting to ensure adequate sanitation standards in the food you sell. The government finally enacted some regulations in the mid-80's to try to roll back the epidemics. The authors point out the declining infant mortality rate, which neoliberal advocates point to with pride is, apart from the expanding birth rate in the upper classes, in large part due to "socialistic" government programs targeting new mothers and infants. The health of the infants and mothers after they conclude the program is, of course, another story. The authors show that Chile's privitization and municipilization of education has grossly skewed the benefits towards wealthy municipalities able to generate the resources and high-income students to be "self-financing."

They show that the privitized social security accounts are of scant benefit for a large number of Chileans who cannot generate enough income to meet their stringent minimum requirements. This great mass of people inevitably have to fall back on the scant package offered by the government which, combined with required government payments to those who retired before the early 80's when privitization was implemented, promises to bring severe fiscal probolems for Chile in the next few decades. They show that wages have stagnated or declined relative to pre-1973 levels--per capita income did not return to its 1970 level until 1989. They show that the monumental economic crises in the early 80's which admirers of Pinochet's economic policies like to forget, was very much due to the extreme neoliberal policies of the junta. In the late 70's Chile's economy took off. Tarrifs were eliminated, restrictions on foreign investment lifted and the Peso was pegged at 39 to the dollar, considerably overvalued. The result was a flood of ultra-cheap imports, mostly luxury items and little productive inbestment. The banks, freed from regulation, recklessly loaned out. Then at the end of 1981 all of the suddent there was recession in the U.S. and thus restriction of its market, capital flight, corporations and banks under enormous debt went under and the economy was on the verge of collapse. Pinochet took over the bankrupt banks and corporations using the resources provided by Chile's immensely profitable government owned companies to get back into shape and then sold them to his friends and foreign corporations at grossly undervalued prices. During this process some unkind critics labeled it--"the Chicago road to socialism"--government ownership was as high as it ever was during Allende's term--after the proteges of University of Chicago free market gurus like Milton Friedman who took over Chile's economic policy after 1975. The immensely profitable public companies then followed into the private sector, again grossly low prices.

The show that working conditions, wages and living conditions have largely gone down hill, helped enormously by Pinochet's extreme anti-labor policies. The rapid elimination of native forests and fisheries protends serious problems. Miss Rosenfeld points out that the democratic governments since 1990 have eliminated some of the harder edges of Pinochet's policies by increasing spending considerably for housing and other social services and increasing the minimum wage and have shown more success in narrow statistical indicators than he ever did. But the structure of his society is still more or less intact; Chile is still primarily an export-oriented economy, largely by exploiting non-renewable resources. Its over-reliance, for instance, of grape exports, the workers in whose industry are mostly temporary laboring under bad conditions and low wages, makes it very vulnerable to new competitors who are discovering more cheaper ways of production and can pay even lower wages. Government funding for research and development and funding of infrastructure before 1973 laid the basis for the industry's prosperity but since that time it has been eliminated.

The book is a little bit dated and I didn't understand one or two points but it is a very important book and, for an economics book, lucidly written.

McCormick's excellent book is a history detailing the reasons and methods for the United State's drive towards a fabled China Market. By the 1870's, the elites within the United State's faced by many cycles of boom and bust realized the need to create a buffer against social unrest. Rather than divide the economic pie more equitably the elite's realized it would be in their interests to enlarge the pie, but keep the divisions the same. McCormick's book explains the origins of our export oriented global economy. The building and controlling of the Panama Canal was seen as a key ingrediant to gain advantage over the other Industrialized Nations. First Panama had to be artificially carved out of Columbia. The Spanish American War was seen as alligned Cuba as a Protectorate of the Canal Zone as well as providing refueling stations, via the Phillipines, in the Pacific. A considerable obstacle was getting the Unites State's foot in the door in China. The other European powers all had dreams of controlling the China arket. John Hays game up with Open Door Notes legitimizing United States interests via the veil of comparative advantage. The Open Door notes can be interpreted as the seed that grew into the Wilsonian - Multlateral approach to world trade that has dominated economic theory since the end of the second world war. McCormicks work is a very important history which will help us understand the elite interest's behind foreign policy.

Using an institutional approach, the author shed extremely useful light on complex and unknown matters concerning real cases. This is an important book on both practical and theoretical aspects.

This is a far cry from the dry business "How to" book. Mr. Nemeth opens a new dimension of understanding time management and how to apply it to every business. He doesn't tell you how to get there, he brings you there. This book helped me to step back and take a refreshing look at our workflow. It is a light-hearted read addressing a serious subject, lost time means lost customers equals lost profits. Take the time to read this book and then gain the time back by applying its MARKET EFFICIENCY methods.