Verso spring 2000 catalogue that arrived via postal mail yesterday includes following item (not yet at Verso website):
_A New Economy?_ Doug Henwood July release
Description: You can hardly open a paper without reading some grand claim about a New Economy - one freed of all the antique logic of things, weightless, nimble, and unimaginably productive. In the celebratory version, the New Economy is one of endless freedom and possibility, with all old hierarchies overturned. In the disciplinary version, the old comforts of the past, like unions, benefits, and job security, are now unaffordable luxuries, and we all have to buckle down because someone in Malaysia is gunning for our jobs. And in the gloomy version, popular among certain kinds of leftists, the old humane, localist capitalism is gone, replaced by a pitiless globalized order and the end of work.
There's enough truth in all this to make it believable, but there's also no small amount of hype and millennial delusion bound in with it. Since its birth, capitalism has been a relentlessly innovating, globalizing system, and in that sense there's always a new economy. But what is newly new?
In this book, Doug Henwood scrutinizes the 1990s economy and questions whether it lives up to its press. Has the US economy boomed because of the efficacy of its model? What's been happening with jobs and incomes, wealth and debt? Is today's worker really a free agent? Has productivity rebounded, and if so, how have computers contributed to the bounce? How big has finance become and why? Is the state really shrinking? Just what's wrong in principle with 'globalization,' anyway?
All in only 160 pages... Michael Hoover