The Expendables

how the middle class got screwed by globalisation
Jeff Rubin

‘A forensic study of globalisation … rigorous.’

David Kernek, Irish Examiner

‘Rubin … leverages his firm grasp of geopolitics and economics to offer not only a primer on macroeconomics, but also on how globalisation — that is, the process of opening up international markets — has routed the middle class and propped up the elite.’

Winnipeg Free Press

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‘The latest from the author of Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller continues his disruptive ways in this analysis of how the collapse of union membership and the near obsolescence of full-time employment is squeezing out the middle class … [Rubin] is a fiercely independent thinker.’

NOW

Praise for Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller:

‘Rubin’s argument is powerful.’

Newsweek

Praise for Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller:

‘One of the year’s best.’

Financial Times

Praise for The Big Flatline:

‘[Rubin] states unequivocally that the reason economists and politicians have failed to reverse the current recession is that they are relying on outmoded world views … Clearly written and smartly argued.’

Kirkus Reviews

Praise for The Carbon Bubble:

‘Jeff Rubin at his finest. Thought-provoking. Meticulously researched. Intelligent without pretension. I highly, highly recommend it!’

Michael Hlinka, CBC Radio

‘[A] snappily written work.’

Fiona Capp, The Age

A provocative, far-reaching account of how the middle class got stuck with the bill for globalisation, and how, even before the coronavirus, the blowback — from Brexit to Trump to populist Europe — was going to change the developed world.

Real wages have not risen much for decades. Union membership has collapsed. Full-time employment is beginning to look like a quaint idea from the distant past. Falling tariffs, low interest rates, global deregulation, and tax policies that benefit the rich have all had the same effect: the erosion of the middle class.

Bestselling author Jeff Rubin argues that all this was foreseeable back when major Western countries started to believe their own propaganda about free trade, and especially when they allowed China to exploit weaknesses in the trading system they devised.

The result, growing global inequality, is a problem of our own making. And solving it won’t be easy if we draw on the same ideas about capital and labour, right and left, that led us to this cliff. Articulating a vision that, remarkably, dovetails with the ideas of both Naomi Klein and Donald Trump, The Expendables is an exhilaratingly fresh perspective that is at once humane and irascible, fearless and rigorous, and, most importantly, timely.

‘A forensic study of globalisation … rigorous.’

David Kernek, Irish Examiner

Winnipeg Free Press

View all reviews

NOW

Praise for Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller:

‘Rubin’s argument is powerful.’

Newsweek

Praise for Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller:

‘One of the year’s best.’

Financial Times

Praise for The Big Flatline:

Kirkus Reviews

Praise for The Carbon Bubble:

‘Jeff Rubin at his finest. Thought-provoking. Meticulously researched. Intelligent without pretension. I highly, highly recommend it!’

Michael Hlinka, CBC Radio

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Details

Format:Paperback

Size: 234mm × 153mm

Extent:352pp

ISBN (13):9781922310217

RRP:$34.99

Pub date:1 Sep 2020

Rights Held: UK & Commonwealth (ex Canada)

High-res cover:Download Image

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Jeff Rubin

Jeff Rubin is a world-leading Canadian economist. An expert on trade and energy, and former chief economist and chief strategist at CIBC World Markets, he recently served as a senior fellow at Canada’s Centre for International Governance. His first book, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, was an international bestseller, and since then he has written two other bestsellers, The End of Growth and The Carbon Bubble.

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The Expendables

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how the middle class got screwed by globalisation Jeff Rubin

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how the middle class got screwed by globalisation
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