Phillip Brown

I wish I could require our president and the entire congress to read this book. I think the authors pegged exactly how globalization is working in the world economy. They made a reasonable case that we can't educate ourselves out of the problems. Also a rising India and China may not necessarily raise the economy for all especially the poor and less educated peoples of the U.S. and Europe. They poked wholes in Thomas Friedman's argument that improved education will save Western nations and bring prosperity to all.

The weakness of their argument is their assertion that a small elite (the 1% in today's terms) of "talent' are reaping all the rewards of globalization. I'm afraid they could be right as this would explain the high paid CEOs who claimed to know nothing about the kind of loans their banks were making or the kind of derivatives their brokerage was selling. Still the authors didn't make the case with numbers or statistics as clearly as they did for their other assertions. The one number that sticks in my mind is that only 11% of Ivy League students come from low income homes. Anyway great read and not too academic.… (more)