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The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century Hardcover – September 20, 2016

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4.1 out of 5 stars 7 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: St. Martin's Press (September 20, 2016)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1250075807
  • ISBN-13: 978-1250075802
  • Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1 x 9.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #14,135 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3.0 out of 5 starsThe author is too young to write this kind of book
By Jackal on September 25, 2016
Format: Hardcover
First two observations: (1) The author writes well. Informal and sometimes witty.It is clear that he works for The Economist. A young person writing like an old person as somebody said. (2) The author is a representative of a new generation of journalists at the magazine. They somehow want to have free markets, but are afraid of how the same markets influence society. Since they have no experience of governments interfering in the the 1970s, they are optimistic about the ability to interfere with the markets. The author comes across as a Tony Blair supporter. Very different from the old style journalist at The Economist.

The book itself is very basic. Somehow I think the author is not experienced enough to write a broad book. A lot of sections are well written primers on the economy (e.g. how spending leads to a multiplier effect in an economy). This could be useful reading, if you are not at all familiar with economics. The main weakness with the book is its lack of depth. The author is not trying to understand chains of causality at all. He talks about a surplus of labour, but does not talk about how immigration has increased the surplus of labour. Instead he speculates about working fewer hours per week.The broad questions raised are interesting, but the author is flaky and not able to push the discussion forward. It is more like a conventional, running commentary of what other have said.

I would rather recommend The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class for its macro perspective and The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies for its interesting micro-focus on how work is changing.
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4.0 out of 5 starsMostly excellent analysis - few useful proposals
By Nigel Seel on October 5, 2016
Format: Hardcover
Economist writer Ryan Avent begins by noting that in the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, industrial progress was breathtaking. Machine-power – primarily steam but later oil, petrol and electrical – displaced human and animal labour within the economy, dramatically increasing productivity. By contrast, the late twentieth century seemed a period of placid advance leading to the stagnation many diagnose in our own troubled times. Yet we stand in the path of the forthcoming AI-powered digital revolution, one which will substitute for workers’ brainpower as mechanisation previously did for their muscles.

Massive increases in productivity promise that old Marxist dream, abundance, where the mass of people (not just a pampered elite) are free to follow their dreams. But can capitalism deliver? If workers are being displaced from employment in their millions, they won’t be able to afford all those wonderful new goods, while collapse in demand prevents firms from investing in that exciting new technology.

With affordable, competent robotics plus business software systems of ever-increasing sophistication and scope, there is a hollowing out of the labour force. At the low-skilled, menial end there is still a place for hands-on care staff, warehouse sweepers and drivers; at the high end engineers and designers with advanced degrees develop, configure and maintain advanced automation systems. But that hollow in the middle just keeps getting bigger.

The resulting abundance of labour tends to decrease pay, increase unemployment and most notably undermine the organising and political power of ‘the labour movement’.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsEconomists reduce the human animal to a data point in an econometric model
By Graham H. Seibert TOP 1000 REVIEWER on September 21, 2016
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Philosophers tend to reduce the human animal to an idealization. It doesn't work. It results in simplistic solutions – Communism and Keynesianism – which fail in practice.

Ryan Avent has been a columnist for The Economist magazine for seven years. After taking his MBA, he worked briefly at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. His description of the corporate culture of The Economist is one of the high points of the book. His description from the inside jibes very well with what one experiences from the outside, as a reader.

The book puts both Mr. Avent's strengths and weaknesses on display. He is a bright man and a hard worker. On the other hand, one senses that his worldview conforms very much to that of the establishment publication for which he works and the establishment institutions where he studied. While the book adheres pretty much to liberal orthodoxy, Avent is candid enough to recognize several internal inconsistencies.

Avent scatters clues throughout the book that he knows some of the truth about humanity, but he relentlessly omits it from his analysis and his projections. Let me cite some of the truths that he observes.

1) People support their own. "It is no wonder that experimental, generous welfare policy has tended to emerge in Nordic countries, where ethnic and communal ties are strong (but where openness to immigration has begun to tear at the social consensus)." Also: "The ethno-nationalist diversity of the American population, however, has long been an obstacle to the construction of an exceptionally generous welfare state. White voters in the South are skeptical of a welfare state that promises to deliver generous support to black Americans in northern cities, or to Latin Americans in California.Read more ›
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