Customer Reviews

The World's Wasted Wealth 2: Save Our Wealth, Save Our Environment

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This book provides a fantastic look at both the historical and current dimensions of the political economy of the world. Detailed analysis is presented remarkably using the simplest words to describe the insanity of the wasteful consumption that surrounds us. This is a must read book. It shows how most wars throughout history (including cold wars) have resources and trade at their core -- including both World Wars. J. W. Smith goes on to show that the resources wasted in just the Cold War could have industrialized the world more than two times over!

This book builds on the work of Vance Packard, exploring an unpopular issue today of the incredibly wasteful world we are so proud of. This book occasionally misses, some examples and points are weak, but overall this explores a subject long overdue for review.

Just make the author master of the world, and he will solve all
problems. Where have we heard this before? It took Dr. Smith
a longish time to get his doctorate, and his doctoral committee might
have been a mite more discriminating.. Dr. Smith sees lots of conspiracies,
and there is some truth in some of his claims---the sort of stuff sophomores stumble on with regular frequency. But, for such a broad stroke view of the problems of power and economics, the reader would do much better to go to
Vilfredo Pareto's Mind and Society or to James Burnham's The Machiavellians.