economy

Friedman, Thomas L and Michael Mandelbaum (2011) That Used to Be Us: How America fell behind in the world it invented and how we can come back. Farrar, Straus and Girous: New York, NY.
Book review by Darcy Hitchcock

This is Friedman’s lament about how the United States lost its leadership and what we should do to gain it back. He explains how we unraveled public/private partnerships on the 5 pillars of society:

Public education
Infrastructure
Immigration
Government supported research and development
Regulations on private economic activity.

He lays out four challenges:

Adapt to globalization
Adapt to the IT revolution
Budget deficit
Climate/energy

He sees our political process being the root of our inability to take effective action. In the end, his major recommendation is for a serious independent candidate. He does not expect this person to win, but this person could reveal the problems with both party platforms and change the debate.
 

Florida, Richard (2010) The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity. New York, NY: Harper Collins.

This book provides a nice history of western style capitalism up to the current crash: bubbles, suburban development, technology. He compares this economic crisis to other societal resets like the Industrial Revolution and the Great Depression. Then he provides some insights about where we go from here. Florida is mostly focused on socio-economic issues and is particularly blind to environmental issues. For example, he dismisses Peak Oil not because it’s not an issue but because he thinks time wasted commuting is a bigger issue. Huh? All other resource constraints seem to be off his radar. That said, there are some important insights. He talks about megaregions as being economic powerhouses: Char-Lanta (Charlotte, Atlanta, Raleigh-Durham), So-Cal, Tor-Mon-tawa (Toronto, Montreal, Ottowa), So-Flo (Orlando, Tampa) Dal-Austin (Dallas and Austin), Hou-Orleans (Houston and New Orleans, Cascadia (Seattle, Portland, Vancouver BC), Pho-Tuc (Phoenix, Tucson) Den-Bo (Denver, Boulder).

Some of his insights are a blast from the past. Given that so many jobs are service jobs, Florida advocates for employee involvement strategies like Quality Circles (um, that was popular in the 1970’s-80’s but I’m all for resurrecting high-performance strategies); or more radical involvement like Whole Foods where the employees vote whether new probationary employees should be hired or Zappos where they offer new employees $1000 to quit as a test to see if they really fit the culture.

He also picks up on some disruptive trends, like young people not being that interested in owning cars, in part driven by the percentage of income that we pay on housing and automobiles has doubled (about 22% in the 1950s to 44% in the mid 1980s. (Why the most recent figure is 25 years old was not explained.)

The book had some interesting statistics (eg China will have more high speed rail by 2020 than the rest of the world combined). But in the end, I was not wowed by the book: Good information for anyone who’s not already paying attention, but not much in terms of new insights. The title was better than the content.

Goodwin, Neva, Julie Nelson and Jonathan Harris (2009) Macroeconomics in Context. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe.

If you’re looking for a textbook on economics that integrates sustainability issues, this is a good choice. It exposes some of the weaknesses in classical economics while covering all the basics. It’s interesting to learn some of the oddities of some of the metrics. For example, if you work for no pay in a family business for 15 hours or more, or if you worked for hire for  only an hour in the last week, you’re considered employed.  But it’s still an economics textbook. Don’t try to read it in one sitting.

Edwards, Andrés (2010) Thriving Beyond Sustainability: Pathways to a resilient society. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.

Finally a book that doesn’t waste chapters documenting the problems. This book pulls together a lot of the solutions already underway. Chapters include learning from our ancestors, going ‘glocal’, greening commerce, regenerative design, etc. The up-side is that this book pulls together a bunch of good initiatives; the down-side is that if you’ve been in the industry for a while, only dribs and drabs will be new to you.

The last chapter lays out his SPIRALS framework, a set of criteria for what he calls a ‘thriveable future’: scaleable, place-making, intergenerational, resilient, accessible, life-affirming, self-care.