The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism

Why is the gap between rich and poor widening, both in the U.S. and globally? Linking income differentials to levels of education, Reich ( The Next American Frontier ) divides the universe of jobs into three categories: routine production, in-person services and symbolic-analytic. Symbolic analysts--those who identify, solve and broker problems--are doing well, while prospects for the other types of workers are declining, Reich maintains. He links their fortunes to a newly emerging, global economic order in which the description, ``U.S. corporation,'' is increasingly a fiction as companies operate transnationally in a decentralized web of goods and services. This immensely stimulating treatise holds that the prosperity of a nation and its people is ever more tenuously linked to corporate profitability. Reich urges Americans to develop skills that contribute to the world economy, to invest in infrastructure, education and training, and to be open to foreign investments in U.S. enterprises. BOMC and QPB alternate s . (Mar.)