Gabor Steingart – Weltkrieg um Wohlstand
Several outtakes of this book where already posted on SPON, and within the Spiegel Print Magazine. These articles had convinced me to buy this book as a reading material for my holidays. Flanked by Noam Chomsky’s “Profit over people” I got quite an interesting view on globalization.
The first part of the book (which is not covered by the outtakes) provides necessary background information to fully understand the rest of the book, and already this overview was worth buying the whole book. The first chapters give a decent picture of the historic development of the worlds leading economies. This information is quite helpful for a good understanding of the ongoing changes in our world.
Steingart describes the current situation as very dangerous for Europe and the US. Western Countries have very high social standards, where some Asian countries don’t care at all, but given a free market the goods are distributed all over the globe and compete with each other regardless how they have been manufactured. Countries like China even protect there economies by different actions (like keeping the exchange rates for their currencies artificially down). Because of this situation our high social standards are endangered. The only chance to protect these standard is in Steingart's opinion to establish a free trade region between Europe and the US (which have similar standards) and protect this region against other economies which do not keep up those standards.
In my opinion this book gives a very realistic image of the current globalization process and Steingart's recommendations should not stay unheard.
Also, ich bin über den wirtschaftsgeschichtlichen Teil noch nicht hinausgekommen, aber der war schomma echt gut. Ich halte es sogar für sinnvoller, WiWi-Studenten im Grundstudium solch eine (um nicht zu sagen: diese) Lektüre anzuempfehlen, als zB eine Veranstaltung zu Grundlagen der VWL oder im internationalen Management.
The weather was a real dream – blue skies, temperatures above 25°C – only the relatively cold water at the swimming pool was a little annoying. Anyway, it was the perfect day to be lazy and to enjoy the sun. I managed to finish reading Gabor Steingar
Weblog: Jay's Malaysia Diary (Jürgen Hösch's Malaysia Tagebuch)Tracked: Dec 25, 21:35
I had this meme last year, and I thought it might be nice to answer it again. Last year it was dominated by issues during my stay in Malaysia. Guess this year it's a little less extraordinary.Gained or lost weight? – Don't know, don't care - my friends
Weblog: Jay's Malaysia Diary (Jürgen Hösch's Malaysia Tagebuch)Tracked: Dec 31, 16:33