The Expendables
How the Middle Class Got Screwed By Globalization
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The Expendables
Narrated by:
Jeff Rubin
Buy Now for £20.49
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Narrated by:
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Jeff Rubin
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By:
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Jeff Rubin
About this listen
Real wages in North America have not risen since the 1970s. Union membership has collapsed. Full-time employment is beginning to look like a quaint idea from the distant past. If it seems that the middle class is in retreat around the developed world, it is.
Former CIBC World Markets Chief Economist Jeff Rubin argues that all this was foreseeable back when Canada, the United States and Mexico first started talking free trade. Labour argued then that manufacturing jobs would move to Mexico. Free-trade advocates disagreed. Today, Canadian and American factories sit idle. More steel is used to make bottlecaps than cars. Meanwhile, Mexico has become one of the world's biggest automotive exporters. And it's not just NAFTA. Cheap oil, low interest rates, global deregulation and tax policies that benefit the rich all have the same effect: the erosion of the middle class.
Growing global inequality is a problem of our own making, Rubin argues. And solving it won't be easy if we draw on the same ideas about capital and labour, right and left, that led us to this cliff. Articulating a vision that dovetails with the ideas of both Naomi Klein and Donald Trump, The Expendables is an exhilaratingly fresh perspective that is at once humane and irascible, fearless and rigorous, and most importantly, timely. GDP is growing, the stock market is up and unemployment is down, but the surprise of the book is that even the good news is good for only one percent of us.
Critic reviews
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BUSINESS BOOK AWARD
“Rubin . . . leverages his firm grasp of geopolitics and economics to offer not only a primer on macroeconomics, but also on how globalization—that is, the process of opening up international markets—has routed the middle class and propped up the elite.” —Winnipeg Free Press
“The latest from the author of Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller continues his disruptive ways in this analysis of how the collapse of union membership and the near obsolescence of full-time employment is squeezing out the middle class. . . . [Rubin] is a fiercely independent thinker.” —NOW
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BUSINESS BOOK AWARD
“Rubin . . . leverages his firm grasp of geopolitics and economics to offer not only a primer on macroeconomics, but also on how globalization—that is, the process of opening up international markets—has routed the middle class and propped up the elite.” —Winnipeg Free Press
“The latest from the author of Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller continues his disruptive ways in this analysis of how the collapse of union membership and the near obsolescence of full-time employment is squeezing out the middle class. . . . [Rubin] is a fiercely independent thinker.” —NOW
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