Bad Samaritans or The Girl I Left behind

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Author: Ha Joon Chang

With irreverent wit, an engagingly personal style, and a battery of real-life examples, Ha-Joon Chang blasts holes in the "World Is Flat" orthodoxy of Thomas Friedman and other neo-liberal economists who argue that only unfettered capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty. On the contrary, Chang shows, today's economic superpowers - from the United States to Britain to his native South Korea - all attained prosperity by shameless protectionism and government intervention in industry. We in the wealthy nations have conveniently forgotten this fact, telling ourselves a fairy tale about the magic of free trade and - via our proxies such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization - ramming policies that suit ourselves down the throat of the developing world.

Unlike typical economists who construct models of how economies are supposed to behave, Chang examines the past: what has actually happened. His pungently contrarian history demolishes one pillar after another of free-market mythology. We treat patents and copyrights as sacrosanct - but developed our own industries by studiously copying others' technologies. We insist that centrally planned economies stifle growth - but many developing countries had higher GDP growth before they were pressured into deregulating their economies. Both justice and common sense, Chang argues, demand that we reevaluate the policies we force on weaker nations. Bad Samaritans calls on America to return to its abandoned role, embodied in programs like the Marshall Plan, to offer a helping hand, instead of a closed fist, to countries struggling to follow in ourfootsteps.

Publishers Weekly

In the 1950s, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, suffering the aftereffects of decades of brutal Japanese colonialism and war with its northern counterpart. During his childhood, Chang (Kicking Away the Ladder), a respected economist at the University of Cambridge, witnessed the beginnings of Korea's postwar economic miracle as Gen. Park Chung-Hee's dictatorship (despite its corrupt machinations) set the economic groundwork that would lift Korea out of poverty. Though Korea's strategies are "heretical" to first world, free-market economists, Chang argues that the world's wealthiest nations historically relied on the same heavy-handed protectionist approaches in their quests for economic hegemony. These wealthy, first world economies, which "preach free market and free trade to the poor countries in order to capture larger shares of the latter's markets and to pre-empt the emergence of possible competitors" are Chang's "bad Samaritans." Chang builds his outsider stance through a history of capitalism and globalization and stories of other struggling countries' economic transformations. The resulting polemic about the shortcomings of neoliberal economic theory's belief in unlimited free-market competition and its effect on the developing world is provocative and may hold the key to similar miracles for some of the world's most troubled economies. (Jan.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Library Journal

University of Cambridge economics professor Chang (Institutional Change and Economic Development ) joins the heated discussion on globalization and economic justice with his alternative, iconoclastic views on the currently popular free-trade dogma of global capitalism. Contrary to the opinions of neoliberal economists (e.g., Thomas Friedman) who argue that only free capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty, Chang instead explains that today's economic superpowers, including the United States, Britain, and his native South Korea, all attained their prosperity by shameless government protectionism and intervention in industry. Solidly researched and filled with striking examples, this book does not deny the benefits of integration into the world economy to developing countries, but it also draws on the lessons of history to argue that Third World nations must be allowed to integrate on their own terms. Chang's starkly stated, oppositional views will stimulate refreshing debate among economists, and the crisp, steady narration by Jim Bond maintains listener interest in material that may be better received in university graduate economics classes. Highly recommended for university libraries supporting a business and economics curriculum and for larger public libraries.-Dale Farris, Groves, TX

Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Go to: Calamari y Hornbook de Perillo de Contratos

The Girl I Left behind: A Narrative History of the Sixties

Author: Judith Nies

At the height of the Vietnam War protests, twenty-eight-year-old Judith Nies and her husband lived a seemingly idyllic life. Both were building their respective careers in Washington—Nies as the speechwriter and chief staffer to a core group of antiwar congressmen, her husband as a Treasury department economist. They lived in the carriage house of the famed Marjorie Merriweather Post estate. But when her husband brought home a list of questions from an FBI file with Judith's name on the front, Nies soon realized that her life was about to take a radical turn. Shocked to find herself the focus of an FBI investigation into her political activities, Nies began to reevaluate her role as grateful employee and dutiful wife. In The Girl I Left Behind, she chronicles the experiences of those women who, like herself, reinvented their lives in the midst of a wildly shifting social and political landscape.

In a fresh, candid look at the 1960s, Nies pairs illuminating descriptions of feminist leaders, women's liberation protests, and other pivotal social developments with the story of her own transformation into a staunch activist and writer. From exposing institutionalized sexism on Capitol Hill in her first published article to orchestrating the removal of a separate "Ladies Gallery" on the House floor to taking leadership of the Women in Fellowships Committee, Nies discusses her own efforts to enlarge women's choices and to change the workplace—and how the repercussions of those efforts in the sixties can still be felt today.

A heartfelt memoir and piercing social commentary, The Girl I Left Behind recounts one woman's courageous journey towardindependence and equality. It also evaluates the consequences of the feminist movement on the same women who made it happen—and on the daughters born in their wake.

Publishers Weekly

Future chroniclers of the period may well place the drug and hippie scene as, historically, mere decorative fringe to "the women's movement that came out of the 1960s," which was, according to Nies, "the most successful and transformative social movement of the twentieth century." Historian and biographer Nies (Nine Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition) combines her memoir of the girl she was with an account of the world in which she grew up to become a "pioneer feminist." She delineates a milieu of limitations on women's lives unimaginable today—a time when "women were supposed to marry well, dress well, and entertain well," and when men's clubs had "Ladies' Entrances" and Congress a "Ladies' Gallery." Nies combines personal memoir (her family history, student days, her travels, her marriage, her jobs from summer waitress to being "one of only a handful of professional women on Capitol Hill") with period history (the Cuban missile crisis, the Women Strike for Peace campaign against nuclear testing, the formation of NOW) and well-known people with whom she crosses paths (Madeleine Albright, Paul Wolfowitz, Dorothy Day and Gloria Steinem, to name a few). While the book lags at times, Nies's combination period history and memoir is a highly valuable first-person record of a woman who finds herself, and the movement she grew with. (June)

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Lisa Nussbaum - Library Journal

This memoir spans the Sixties, when anti-Vietnam War rallies, women's and civil rights marches, sit-ins, and boycotts produced an era of great social upheaval. Nies matches these expressions of unrest with injustices encountered in her own life at the time. She learned about gender discrimination when she found herself unemployable after earning a graduate degree at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Nies explains that the few women who got hired from programs such as hers worked primarily in clerical or low-level positions for the CIA. She finally found a job with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and explains how she went on to work for 11 different liberal antiwar U.S. congressmen-"the best job in Washington"-doing research, writing speeches, and more. But there was still inequality. When she attended a congressional hearing on the Vietnam War, she was told she could sit only in the women's gallery, to which she responded that Congress was violating its own law, Title IX, which guaranteed equal access to public accommodations. Ultimately, Nies writes of coming of age as a stronger and wiser self than the "girl" she was at the beginning. The life experiences and lessons she relates so freshly (including political parallels to this era's war) will make this book captivating for students of the political and cultural history of the Sixties. Highly recommended for academic libraries and larger public libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Relating her transformation from naive girl to empowered political woman, the author also paints a larger picture of the 1960s on Capitol Hill and beyond. Bolstered by contemporary statistics and an excellent memory, Nies (Writing/Massachusetts College of Art; Nine Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition, 2002, etc.) details the life changes she experienced alongside countless other women during a decade of secrecy, boys'-club politics and outright lies. Although handpicked from her blue-collar background to attend the prestigious Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Nies quickly learned that secretary was about the highest title an educated American woman could attain in the '60s. She fought to carve out a space for herself in politics and international relations, relying on persistence, the support of the nascent women's movement and no small measure of guts. She gradually accomplished feats both personal and political, working with or against many famous, influential people along the way. In her punchy memoir, Nies demonstrates that equal rights for women in the workplace did not just happen, nor did they materialize as the result of benevolent male politicians finally deciding to do the right thing. Generations of female activists worked tirelessly behind the scenes to change the country's mind-set about women in the workplace and to raise awareness of crucial issues including child care, birth control and sexual harassment. Many of the dramatic trials and victories she records have faded from public consciousness, even though today's young women directly benefit from the efforts of their female forebears. The book's narrative style-blunt, unflinching,honest-serves the story well, and Nies refuses to gloss over her own flaws and errors. She ably details the conflicting demands made on and by women and their plural strategies for resolving them. Both educational and entertaining, with a wry, ironic wit evident throughout. Agent: Betsy Amster/Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises