The Judas Economy: The Triumph of Captial and the Betrayal of Work: William Wolman, Anne Colamosca
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Economist Wolman and writer Colamosca, both of BusinessWeek, address the insecurity felt by today’s white-collar and managerial workers, arguing that like blue-collar workers they are increasingly expendable as corporations downsize and export jobs overseas to low-wage areas. The authors question whether America can remain capitalism’s most creative leader while shedding its most trusted managers and professionals. They find some comfort, however, in signs that the virtues of unchecked global capitalism are now being questioned. Although the authors make some telling points, the force of their argument is often dissipated by loose organization and turgid prose. An optional purchase for academic libraries with large collections in economics.?Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The authors, associated with Business Week (Wolman is its chief economist), are “great believers in the dynamism of the free market” and maintain that “the victory of free market ideology in the cold war has upset the balance between the market and the state that promoted unparalleled prosperity” in industrial nations since World War II. With increasingly mobile capital and a low-wage global labor pool, U.S. workers (including managers and professional and technical “elite workers”) are contestants in a “race without a finish line.” Wolman and Colamosca analyze the “divorce” of capital from work with charts and graphs as well as field research (e.g., on the software industry in Bangalore, India). To avert “the most plausible scenario” (”that those who earn their living from work in the U.S. will slowly be ground down by deflationary economic policies, . . . totally inappropriate in a global economy in which emerging countries are growing rapidly”), they urge government investment in education, infrastructure, and R & D and cooperation by developed nations to challenge the deflationary tyranny of bond traders and central bankers. Full of useful facts that will generate debate. Mary Carroll