The Work Of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism - Hardcover

Reich, Robert B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394583523 ISBN 13: 9780394583525

Publisher: Knopf, 1991

Synopsis

What skills will be the most valuable in the coming century? How can our country ensure that all its citizens have a share in the new global economy? The author of The Next American Frontier addresses these questions in a trail-blazing new book that is certain to guide a generation of policy makers.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

Reviews

Why is the gap between rich and poor widening, both in the U.S. and globally? Linking income differentials to levels of education, Reich ( The Next American Frontier ) divides the universe of jobs into three categories: routine production, in-person services and symbolic-analytic. Symbolic analysts--those who identify, solve and broker problems--are doing well, while prospects for the other types of workers are declining, Reich maintains. He links their fortunes to a newly emerging, global economic order in which the description, "U.S. corporation," is increasingly a fiction as companies operate transnationally in a decentralized web of goods and services. This immensely stimulating treatise holds that the prosperity of a nation and its people is ever more tenuously linked to corporate profitability. Reich urges Americans to develop skills that contribute to the world economy, to invest in infrastructure, education and training, and to be open to foreign investments in U.S. enterprises. BOMC and QPB alternate s .
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

According to Harvard economist Reich, author of The Resurgent Liberal ( LJ 8/89), we are going through a historic transformation that is rearranging the politics and economics of the 1990s and the 21st century. Economies are no longer simply national in scope but global, rewarding the most skilled around the world with ever greater wealth while consigning the less skilled to declining standards of living. He sees the global work forces as already divided into three groups: routine producers (e.g., data processors), in-person servers (e.g., librarians), and symbolic analysts who manipulate symbols for large profits (e.g., financial wizards). In 1989, these analysts comprised about one-fifth of the population of the United States, but they earned more than half the income. As the rich get richer and the rest get poorer, Reich urges a national recommitment to the productivity and competitiveness of all citizens. This is highly recommended for all academic and public libraries.
- Jeffrey R. Herold, Bucyrus P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394583523
• ISBN 13: 9780394583525
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 331