Economic Futures

The increasingly scarce art of solid, informative, and provocative journalism is a vital mechanism for holding elites accountable in a functioning democracy. While most Beltway pundits blather away about this week’s controversy or next week’s political ploys, former Washington Post correspondent William Greider is among the last—and best—journalists to take seriously his civic responsibility as a watchdog for the ordinary citizen.

Having exposed the fallacies of Reaganomics with his famous 1981 interview of budget director David Stockman, written what is still the most accessible and informative text on the politics of money (1987’s Secrets of the Temple), and penned the essential primer on the decay of American democracy in the 1990s (Who Will Tell the People?), Greider now turns his passion for describing the detailed workings of political and economic reality to the question of global capitalism as a whole in his new work, One World, Ready or Not?

Greider literally traveled the world to write this book. Not content to rest with simplistic generalizations from either the Right or Left about the meaning of "globalization," he opens his pages to the voices of, among others, central bankers in Germany, outlaw labor organizers in Indonesia, economics professors in Japan, debtors’ rights activists in Mexico, and even currency speculators in New York. Greider paints a multilayered, complex picture of how the global market economy is operating in the 1990s, and what this means for ordinary people worldwide.