In this section are a number of books that describe the influence of economic and social changes on communities, families and children in the early part of the 21st century. These changes inevitably have an impact on children’s learning – both positively and negatively.

George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism (1998).

In this book George Soros, billionaire financier and philanthropist, argues that the intellectual concepts we have inherited from the 18th and 19th centuries (objective scientific knowledge, the supremacy of the individual, survival of the fittest) are the ideas behind the emerging global economy. Soros writes that if the global economy is not balanced with a new set of values and ethics (enforced by international regimes) the system will lead to chaos among nations because the global economy is creating too much “social and political disequilibrium” in too many countries on “the periphery” (i.e. Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico) of the great financial centers (i.e. London, New York, and the offshore capital havens).

Frank J. Lechner and John Boli (eds.), The Globalization Reader (2000).

Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why capitalism triumphs in the west and fails everywhere else(2000).

Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (1997).

Kanigel shows how scientific management still dominates the workplace and the classroom. He describes how Frederick Winslow Taylor is the source of that fierce, unholy obsession with “efficiency that marks modern life. The assembly line, the layout of our kitchens, the ways our libraries, fastfood restaurants, and even our churches are organized all owe much to this man, who broke every job into its parts, sliced and trimmed and timed them, and remolded what was left into the work of the 20th century.

From the publisher:

“In the past man had been first. In the future the System will be first,” predicted Frederick Winslow Taylor, the first efficiency expert and model for all the stopwatch-clicking engineers who stalk factories and offices of the industrial world. Taylor influenced Ford’s assembly line and Lenin’s Soviet Russia. Management guru Peter Drucker has ranked him with Freud and Darwin as a maker of the modern world. His ceaseless quest for “the one best way” changed the very texture of twentieth-century life.

In 1874, eighteen-year-old Taylor abandoned his wealthy family’s plans for him to attend Harvard, and instead went to work as a lowly apprentice in a Philadelphia machine shop, shuttling between the manicured hedges of his family’s home and the hot, cussing, dirty world of the shop floor. As he rose through the ranks of management, he began the time-and-motion studies for which he would become famous, and forged his industrial philosophy, Scientific Management.

To organized labor, Taylor was a slave-driver. To the bosses, he was an eccentric who raised wages while ruling the factory floor with a stopwatch. To himself, he was a misunderstood visionary who, under the banner of Science, would confer prosperity on all and abolish the old class hatreds.

To millions today who feel they give up too much to their jobs, Taylor is the source of that fierce, unholy obsession with “efficiency” that marks modern life. The assembly line; the layout of our kitchens; the ways our libraries, fast-food restaurants, and even our churches are organized all owe much to this driven man, who broke every job into its parts, sliced and trimmed and timed them, and remolded what was left into the work of the twentieth century.

Evoking a time when the industrial world was young, new, and exciting, when the sun streamed through great factory windows and filtered through the smoke of the shop floor, Robert Kanigel’s epochal biography recounts the life of the man who taught us not to stop and smell the roses, and whose compulsions eerily foreshadowed how we live and work today.

(Permission to reprint granted by Penguin Putnam Inc.)

Eric Hobsbawm, The New Century (2000).

Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Virtual State: Wealth and power in the coming century (1999).

Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield, Frontiers of Complexity: The Search for Order in a Chaotic World (1995).

Juliet Schor, The Overspent American (1998).

Stephen A. Herzenberg, John A. Alic and Howard Wial, New Rules for a New Economy (1998).

Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution (2000).

Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999).

Charles Handy, The Hungry Spirit: Beyond Capitalism – A Quest for Purpose in the Modern World (1997).

John H. Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order (1998).

Robert Gilpin, The Challenge of Global Capitalism (2000).

Geoff Mulgan, Politics in an Antipolitical Age (1998).

From the publisher:

In the last years of the twentieth century, many of our established political institutions seem to be in crisis. Parties are declining and falling apart. Governments appear unable to lead or to resolve outstanding problems. Radicals feel that old routes to change are blocked.

In this important new book, Geoff Mulgan offers a wide-ranging and powerful analysis of the crisis of contemporary politics. He shows that what was once thought to be a problem peculiar to the Left has now spread to affect the whole of the political system, calling into question the future role of parties, politicians and national governments.

Mulgan argues that an entire era of political institutions and ideologies – stretching back some two hundred years – is now coming to an end, bringing confusion and disorientation to traditional political movements and governments around the world. Politics has transcended its origins in national institutions and spread into new domains of social life, from the global arena to the bedroom. At the same time its central motivating power has waned with a return to ethical and personal sources of meaning. In place of the old politics based around states and markets, a new politics based around the quality and reciprocity of relationships is slowly emerging, brining with it radically new definitions of the links between past and future, governors and governed, men and women.

Politics in an Antipolitical Age is a major contribution to current debates and should be widely read.

Jeff Gates, Democracy at Risk: Rescuing main street from wall street (2000).

David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998).

Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations (1992).

F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944, 1994).

Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics (1999).

Paul Krugman, The Accidental Theorist and Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science (1998).

Paul Krugman, Pop Internationalism (1996).

Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights (1998).

Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies (1998).

Peter F. Drucker, Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999).

Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Equalitarianism (2000).

William Greider, One World, Ready or Not (1997).

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