Search

John Smith's Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century connects the theory of imperialism to Marx's value theory and accounts for the most important changes in global capitalism since Lenin's time: namely, global labor arbitrage and outsourcing. His criticism of the standard statistical measure of GDP and wages is innovative and enlightening, and he effectively connects the global crisis of the early twenty-first century to the new international division of labor. The book suffers from an inadequate definition of its central concept, imperialism, and from a tendency to lapse into old-style deterministic Marxism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Don Katzner's At the Edge of Camelot documents the peculiar and overdetermined conjuncture that allowed for the creation of a radical economics department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the early 1970s. As a participant/observer, this reviewer finds Katzner's description of the competing paradigms in the department's early days off the mark, and his discussion of the department's later history is missing the conflicts that led to the transition from radicalism to heterodoxy. As an institutional history, however, Katzner's is one of the best available in economics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews the books "Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops," by J. S. Ross, and "Can Labor Standards Improve Under Globalization," by Kimberly Ann Elliott and Richard B. Freeman.

The article reviews the book "Global Economy, Global Justice: Theoretical Objections and Policy Alternatives to Neoliberalism," by George F. DeMartino.

Reviews the book `Has Globalization Gone Too Far?' by Dani Rodrik.