Rana Foroohar

As the subtitle tells you, this book is about post-globalism. With the COVID pandemic marking an inflection point, it seems as though we've turned a corner from globalism to regional federation, and Foroohar charts that shift in this book.

In the late aughts, I deferred my college entrance and instead spent a year at a farming and homesteading program. The following year, I helped start a network focused on local food system infrastructure investment (think commercial kitchens, slaughter houses, mills, shipping, etc.). While reading this book, I felt as though Foroohar was trying to summarize a shift that I've been living for my entire adult life.

There's part of me that feels some lack of recognition for the movements and communities whom, from my perspective, have precipitate many of the shifts she describes. She fails to mention Slow Money, The Capital Institute (and their 2012 book, "The Next (Regenerative) Industrial Age: The Story of the National Manufacturing Renaissance Campaign"), Tellus Institute, r3.0, Fibershed, Carol Sanford Institute, The Schumacher Center for New Economics, Buckminster Fuller Institute Post Growth Institute, or Local Future, to name a few. Much of the book is dedicated to building resilience in regional food and fiber systems (domains I have extensive experience with), so I was surprised that we have almost zero overlap in our respective stories of who it is that has brought about some of the shifts that have been happening in these spheres.

If I can let go of the pride I feel for my colleagues for a moment, I can get to a place of being in agreement about the broad strokes of Foroohar's arguments, and actually feeling a little surprise about just how mainstream many of these things have become. Foroohar—an associate editor of the Financial Times—is saying we're in a post-neoliberal world. I hadn't realized we'd arrived so quickly!

Foroohar does get into the ethics of decentralization, and points to the blockchain space as a promising frontier (unlike many journalists of her ilk, who dismiss the ethics of decentralization as naïvely inefficient).

The antagonist of the narrative, as you might have guessed, is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—although Foroohar could do better in precision around her language (often slipping into naming "China" as a whole as the US adversary, which threatens to cross over into the realm of racist nationalism). She also names computer chips as one of the main battle grounds. Having just read Chris Miller's "Chip War," it seems as though Foroohar is overstating the United States ability to re-shore the chip business (Miller concludes that the chip supply chain is fundamentally global, and any decoupling will be extremely fraught and potentially impossible). Realism aside, Foroohar isn't wrong that it isn't worth trying (maybe we could have two independent global chip supply chains instead of one—one US-centric and the other China-centric, but both multi-national).

I actually bought a pair of US-designed, -grown, -spun, -knit, -dyed, -sewn, sweatpants from American Giant as a result of this book, as I was looking for a good pair and was sold on Foroohar's pitch on the company and their practices.

I'm also reading Christopher Alexander's "The Nature of Order" and Andreas Weber's "Enlivenment" at this time, which remind me that Foroohar's rhetoric excludes the aesthetic, animist, and spiritual reasons for following a path of more relationship in our supply webs.

All-in-all, I'm grateful to Foroohar bringing an ethic of regionalism, federation, and decentralization to an audience of the worlds of finance, business, and politics.… (meer)

An interesting book, I learn some very unsavory details about the FANG companies, mission accomplished. I challenge some details in the first chapter. The author seems to say that shoe companies put GPS trackers in (all) of their shoes. As an IoT engineer who struggled with power constraints for a tiny device with GPS tracking, I am wondering where the shoe companies are getting the magical batteries to run these GPS trackers, and the connectivity to get the data back to the mothership. The shoe companies probably do some short-term tracking of elite customers, but I really don't think they are logging every footstrike of every customer.

I read this book in hard copy. I suspect it is a better read as an audio book. The author would have gotten an F from my grammar teachers, she is fond of overlong sentences. Seventy three words in one sentence. I counted.

The author has plainly exposed the broken promise of Google's mission statement, and the very duplicitous behavior of Facebook in particular. She does a good job showing how marketizing our data is not fair.

I just wish the book was much more succint, and shorter, with better fact checking.… (meer)

I had two reactions to this book. First, I enjoyed the research and writing that went into it. You need not be an economics major or have an MBA to understand the stories or the points the author was making. Second, it was very discouraging to realize the power of elites, banks and big investors regarding America's businesses. There were a number of eye opening stories on how markets and companies were manipulated and not in a good way for consumers, employees and Main Street. If you have doubts about our capitalistic economy, your doubts will increase after reading this book.

My Notes and quotes from this book:

This book is an attempt to start that conversation—to illustrate how takers came to dominate makers in our economy, and how we can craft a better future.

Airlines often make more money from hedging on oil prices than on selling seats—while bad bets can leave them with millions of dollars in losses.

Rather than funding the new ideas and projects that create jobs and raise wages, finance has shifted its attention to securitizing existing assets (like homes, stocks, bonds, and such), turning them into tradable products that can be spliced and diced and sold as many times as possible—that is, until things blow up, as they did in 2008.

According to a Stanford University study, innovation tails off by 40 percent at tech companies after they go public, often because of Wall Street pressure to keep jacking up the stock price, even if it means curbing the entrepreneurial verve that made the company hot in the first place.

Studies show that up to 70 percent of the mergers pushed by Wall Street end in disappointment.

Instead of turning the finest business minds into innovators and job creators, it’s turning the people who will run the next generation of American businesses into glorified number crunchers. Business education, it turns out, is failing business.

The bottom line, though, is that far from empowering business, MBA education has fostered the sort of short-term, balance-sheet-oriented thinking that is threatening the economic competitiveness of the country as a whole.

Apple has borrowed most of the money needed to do these massive investor payouts, at the lowest rates in corporate history, in order to avoid taking money out of offshore tax havens and paying the US corporate tax rate on it.

Since 2004, American firms have spent a stunning $7 trillion buying back their own stock—the equivalent of half their profits.

Financially driven outsourcing, worker displacement by cost-saving technology, payouts to investors rather than investments in workers and assets, and short-term thinking in the boardroom and C-suites has undermined American business’s competitiveness and the ability of US firms to create secure, decent-paying jobs.

Washington did a great job saving the banking system in ’08 and ’09 with swift bailouts that averted even worse damage to the economy. But…it has done a terrible job of re-regulating the financial industry and reconnecting it to the real economy. … (meer)