On the Edge : Living with Global Capitalism (Hardcover)

Hutton claims that the USA has more class mobility than Europe. Wrong - Peter Gottschalk and Sheldon Danzinger showed that US workers are less socially mobile than low-paid workers in European countries. Hutton predicts, "the German economy will start to pick up quite smartly." Wrong - unemployment in Germany has now risen to more than four million.

Giddens writes that capitalism is 'fairer than most socialists tended to assume'. Wrong - 86% of Wall Street's gains go to the richest 10% in the US, and US Chief Executive Officers get on average 475 times what their blue-collar workers get. Poverty, he grandly proclaims, is no longer a condition, just the odd brief episode. Wrong - in Britain, three million old people live in poverty, and worldwide, ten million more people now live in poverty than in 1990. He writes, "capitalism has buried the working class." Wrong - worldwide, there are more workers than ever before.

Giddens tells the German government to reform its labour market and welfare system to make it more like the market, because "existing structures of the welfare state are no longer able to deliver". Wrong - it is the market that doesn't work: the average investing household in the USA, forced into stock market gambling to fund their health care, pensions and children's education, has lost $45,000 since the 2000 crash.

They tell us that after the coal-based industrial revolution, then the oil-fired economy, we are now in the third revolution, the third way of the 'knowledge-based', services economy. Wrong - Britain's decline in manufacturing is due to the dominance of finance capital, not to 'a worldwide trend towards a services economy'. Between 1973 and 1992 manufacturing output rose by 25% in Germany, 27% in France, 85% in Italy and 119% in Japan, while in Britain it rose by just 1%.

Witness such startling observations as 2% of the world population being in migration at any given time and the economic meaning of this given that doctors in third-world countries can get better paid work nannying in first world countries.

On a topical note, their is also a description of the creation of the 'Popstars' and 'Pop Idol' automata by the media group Bertlesmann. Will Young, one of the progeny spawned by this media conglomerate, is so talentless that the company have had to take Jim Morrison's Light My Fire out of retirement and I've been forced to listen to this travesty daily on the work radio. Nothing reveals the evil of corporate media like the raping of a dead man's memory by an obvious innocent like Mr. Young for corporate profit.

That and I have to listen to it...