STOP THE WORLD

By Richard Hornik

Following the collapse of communism, the workers of the world, from Polish shipyard electricians to American phone-company executives, are at last united, brought together by a shared anxiety about how they will earn a living. They have reason to worry. Unfettered competition, no longer constrained by political borders, now ruthlessly wipes out slow-footed firms. In order to survive, companies give their first allegiance to efficiency and profits, not to their employees or the communities in which they live and work. In the long run, more wealth is created for everyone, but that is cold comfort for the skilled industrial worker or middle-aged manager who has just been declared "redundant."

In One World, Ready or Not (Simon & Schuster; 528 pages; $27.50) William Greider examines the forces behind this global economic revolution, comparing them to a giant agricultural machine that "throws off enormous mows of wealth and bounty while it leaves behind great furrows of wreckage." Greider, the national editor of Rolling Stone magazine, has a remarkable talent for spotting the economic trends that buffet and baffle ordinary people. He explains cogently why jobs move rapidly from country to country and what impact that has on both the losers and the winners. Drawing on expertise and sources he developed while writing Secrets of the Temple, his definitive study of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, Greider is at his best when he guides the reader through the computerized trading rooms of international financiers like George Soros and James Goldsmith as they roam the globe electronically, ready to pounce on weak economies and overvalued currencies.

Greider argues that the economic machine also sows the seeds of its own destruction by generating an ever increasing bounty of goods while impoverishing the workers who might buy them: "Crudely stated, the technology competition leads companies to invest in more output of goods than the global marketplace of consumers can possibly absorb." The inevitable result, he predicts, will be a global depression.

Unfortunately, Greider's solutions could well do more harm than good. He hails West European efforts to protect existing jobs, but doesn't deal with the fact that those policies make employers reluctant to create new jobs, thus driving unemployment rates in those economies to postwar highs. Similarly, his schemes for slowing the flow of money from country to country would punish serious investors as well as speculators. His insistence that peasants in developing nations need protection from inhumane labor practices ignores the overriding desire of many of those people to escape from the grinding poverty of subsistence farming. Greider also slips when he tries to blame multinational corporations and international financiers--the favorite punching bags of populists--for the very events the book's subtitle ascribes to "the manic logic of global capitalism."

He does, however, make a convincing argument that the blows of rapid economic change fall most heavily on those least able to absorb them, and that it makes sense, both economically and politically, to protect those people. He reminds readers that the economic dislocation of the '20s and '30s opened the way for the rise of fascism. One need only observe the growing strength of the far right in Europe or the strange appeal of ultranationalists in the U.S. to see how the ruthless efficiency of capitalism can create social unrest in tandem with wealth.

Greider concludes that by staying its present course, the world will experience a series of "wrenching calamities." This may be overwrought, but the evidence of global dislocation he presents is sufficient to disturb even a committed believer in the economic revolution sweeping the globe today. --By Richard Hornik