From the #1 bestselling author of Why Your World Is About to Get A
Whole Lot Smaller, a provocative, far-reaching account of how the
middle class got stuck with the bill for globalization, and how the
blowback--from Brexit to Trump to populist Europe--will change the
developed world.
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.
