Age of Insecurity

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This visionary leftist critique of the "new world order" argues that notwithstanding the apparent triumph of big business values from the late 1970s to the present, the resulting free-market, globalized economic system is a failure, producing ever-increasing insecurity and marginalization for the average worker. Elliott, economics editor for the Guardian, and Atkinson, a Guardian reporter, forcefully document the extent to which the middle class has been ravaged by downsizing, vanishing career ladders, growing consolidation of economic power by large firms and low-paid, part-time or home-based work. In their assessment, both Clinton's Democratic centrism and Tony Blair's Labour Party program in Britain offer largely cosmetic reforms but leave essentially intact a laissez-faire capitalism that primarily serves the needs of multinational corporations and a privileged technocratic elite. Calling for a "green Keynesianism," the authors boldly advocate fairer distribution of income both within and between countries; reinvestment in community services; price controls on essential goods and services to benefit the poor at the expense of wealthier consumers; restraints on transnational capital flows; and development of technologies to heal environmental wounds. They weave in a freewheeling cultural history of postwar Britain. Despite the mostly British frame of reference, their study will engage American readers. June