The Future of Success
Robert B Reich
Alfred P Knopf
289 pages/$26
Robert B Reich suddenly quit his job as secretary of labour in the Clinton cabinet and took to teaching and writing when he realised that the job was consuming him. Not only was he losing touch with his family, he was even losing contact with large parts of himself.
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Pegged on this personal experience, the book focuses on the changes in the US society and the workplace through the nineties. It tries to make explicit the implicit choices that many Americans have been making by swimming with the tide of the new economy without pausing to consider what sort of society they are transforming themselves into.
Though the book is firmly based on the US experience and data with occasional references to Europe, globalisation has made many of the choices Americans are being forced to face universal ones.
It is a deeply thoughtful, well researched and articulate attempt to ensure that Americans make the right choice at this historical watershed. Just as by 1950 America was well on its way to organising itself around the core of large scale manufacturing and secure employment, by 2000 it was well set to go back to large scale self-employment and the attendant insecurities that had defined paid work prior to the industrial revolution.
There is now a basic imbalance