Series:

The MIT Press

4 total works

Cover of The Wealth of the World and the Poverty of Nations
The present situation, in which poor nations are becoming richer and rich nations poorer, gives credence to the idea that the former phenomenon is responsible for the latter. The great fear of many in the West is that trade with India, China, or the former Soviet Union will cause a collapse of the welfare state and of society's well-being.

"Globalization" has become a loaded term. Should we believe, literally, that trade with poor nations can be blamed for our "impoverishment"? In this book, Daniel Cohen claims that there is practically no foundation for such an alarmist position. We need to reverse the commonly held view that globalization has caused today's insecure labor market. On the contrary, Cohen argues, our own propensity for transforming the nature of work has created a niche for globalization and given it an ominous dimension, causing some to reject it. Pursuing this erroneous line of thought will place the battle for social welfare "on the sidelines" when it should be fought "on the inside." Such errors in analysis must not persist; as Cohen says, the stakes are too high.

Cover of The Prosperity of Vice

The Prosperity of Vice

by Daniel Cohen

Published 3 February 2012

How violence, rather than peace, has historically accompanied prosperity; and why emerging nations seem poised to repeat the tragic history of the industrialized world.

What happened yesterday in the West is today being repeated on a global scale. Industrial society is replacing rural society: millions of peasants in China, India, and elsewhere are leaving the countryside and going to the city. New powers are emerging and rivalries are exacerbated as competition increases for control of raw materials. Contrary to what believers in the "clash of civilizations" maintain, the great risk of the twenty-first century is not a confrontation between cultures but a repetition of history. In The Prosperity of Vice, the influential French economist Daniel Cohen shows that violence, rather than peace, has been the historical accompaniment to prosperity. Peace in Europe came only after the barbaric wars of the twentieth century, not as the outcome of economic growth. What will happen this time for today's eagerly Westernizing emerging nations?

Cohen guides us through history, describing the European discovery of the "philosopher's stone": the possibility of perpetual growth. But the consequences of addiction to growth are dire in an era of globalization. If a billion Chinese consume a billion cars, the future of the planet is threatened. But, Cohen points out, there is another kind of globalization: the immaterial globalization enabled by the Internet. It is still possible, he argues, that the cyber-world will create a new awareness of global solidarity. It even may help us accomplish a formidable cognitive task, as immense as that realized during the Industrial Revolution-one that would allow us learn to live within the limits of a solitary planet.

Cover of Globalization and Its Enemies
The enemies of globalization--whether they denounce the exploitation of poor countries by rich ones or the imposition of Western values on traditional cultures--see the new world economy as forcing a system on people who do not want it. But the truth of the matter, writes Daniel Cohen in this provocative account, may be the reverse. Globalization, thanks to the speed of twenty-first-century communications, shows people a world of material prosperity that they do want--a vivid world of promises that have yet to be fulfilled. For the most impoverished developing nations, globalization remains only an elusive image, a fleeting mirage. Never before, Cohen says, have the means of communication--the media--created such a global consciousness, and never have economic forces lagged so far behind expectations.Today's globalization, Cohen argues, is the third act in a history that began with the Spanish Conquistadors in the sixteenth century and continued with Great Britain's nineteenth-century empire of free trade. In the nineteenth century, as in the twenty-first, a revolution in transportation and communication did not promote widespread wealth but favored polarization. India, a part of the British empire, was just as poor in 1913 as it was in 1820. Will today's information economy do better in disseminating wealth than the telegraph did two centuries ago? Presumably yes, if one gauges the outcome from China's perspective; surely not, if Africa's experience is a guide. At any rate, poor countries require much effort and investment to become players in the global game. The view that technologies and world trade bring wealth by themselves is no more true today than it was two centuries ago.We should not, Cohen writes, consider globalization as an accomplished fact. It is because of what has yet to happen--the unfulfilled promises of prosperity--that globalization has so many enemies in the contemporary world. For the poorest countries of the world, the problem is not so much that they are exploited by globalization as that they are forgotten and excluded.

Cover of Three Lectures on Post-Industrial Society
In this pithy and provocative book, noted economist Daniel Cohen offers his analysis of the global shift to a post-industrial era. If it was once natural to speak of industrial society, Cohen writes, it is more difficult to speak meaningfully of post-industrial "society." The solidarity that once lay at the heart of industrial society no longer exists. The different levels of large industrial enterprises have been systematically disassembled: tasks considered nonessential are assigned to subcontractors; engineers are grouped together in research sites, apart from the workers. Employees are left exposed while shareholders act to protect themselves. Never has the awareness that we all live in the same world been so strong -- and never have the social conditions of existence been so unequal. In these wide-ranging reflections, Cohen describes the transformations that signaled the break between the industrial and the post-industrial eras. He links the revolution in information technology to the trend toward flatter hierarchies of workers with multiple skills -- and connects the latter to work practices growing out of the culture of the May 1968 protests. Subcontracting and outsourcing have also changed the nature of work, and Cohen succinctly analyzes the new international division of labor, the economic rise of China, India, and the former Soviet Union, and the economic effects of free trade on poor countries. Finally, Cohen examines the fate of the European social model -- with its traditional compromise between social justice and economic productivity -- in a post-industrial world.