Core Reference Note Social versus Economic GapThe paperback is cheaper and recommended over the hardcover, but for decidiing to buy purposes, visit the hardcover to use Inside the Book to examine the Table of Contents and other sample views. For some reason Amazon does not transfer Inside the Book the way they do reviews between hard and soft cover issues of the same content.Measuring Globalisation: Gauging Its Consequences
The web site is really rich in resources and free, recommend a look there as well.
Good news: over time, social globalization (e.g. the spread of the Interent and information access) has increased.
Bad news: it is no longer keeping pace with financial globalization (probably because finance is phantom wealth, as in derivatives) and it is leveling off. What most do not realize is that Human Capital is the only inexhausitble resource we have, and scoial globalization is how we leverage all human minds all the time.
Capitalism today, completely apart from the predatory immoral aspects and the outright fraud of Wall Street and especially Goldman Sachs, Citi-Bank, and Morgan, is focused on the one billion rich whose total economy is one trillion a year. As C. K. Prahalad has so brilliantly pointed out in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the five billion poor have an annual gross income of four trillion dollars a year, and capitalism is ignoring them.
When combined with the infinite wealth creating potential attendant to empowering the poor, see such books as The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom and Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail (BK Currents (Paperback)), the future of humanity would appear to demand a redirection of capitalism and an inversion of our focus on the poor as assets rather than liabilities.
For 1500 other reviews sorted into 98 non-fiction categories, visit Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog. All book reviews lead back to their respective Amazon page, they are simply easier to browse in a coherent fashion there (Amazon has refused for years to implement this and many other suggestions).
