• The Expendables

  • How the Middle Class Got Screwed by Globalization
  • By: Jeff Rubin
  • Narrated by: Jeff Rubin
  • Length: 10 hrs
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (18 ratings)

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The Expendables  By  cover art

The Expendables

By: Jeff Rubin
Narrated by: Jeff Rubin
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Publisher's summary

From the number one best-selling author of Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, a provocative, far-reaching account of how the middle class got stuck with the bill for globalization, and how the blowback - from Brexit to Trump to populist Europe - will change the developed world.

Real wages in North America have not risen since the 1970s. Union membership has collapsed. Full-time employment is beginning to look like a quaint idea from the distant past. If it seems that the middle class is in retreat around the developed world, it is.

Former CIBC World Markets Chief Economist Jeff Rubin argues that all this was foreseeable back when Canada, the United States, and Mexico first started talking free trade. Labor argued then that manufacturing jobs would move to Mexico. Free-trade advocates disagreed. Today, Canadian and American factories sit idle. More steel is used to make bottle caps than cars. Meanwhile, Mexico has become one of the world's biggest automotive exporters. And it's not just NAFTA. Cheap oil, low interest rates, global deregulation, and tax policies that benefit the rich all have the same effect: the erosion of the middle class.

Growing global inequality is a problem of our own making, Rubin argues. And solving it won't be easy if we draw on the same ideas about capital and labor, right and left, that led us to this cliff. Articulating a vision that 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. GDP is growing, the stock market is up, and unemployment is down, but the surprise of the book is that even the good news is good for only one percent of us.

©2020 Jeff Rubin (P)2020 Penguin Random House Canada

Critic reviews

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BUSINESS BOOK AWARD

“Rubin . . . leverages his firm grasp of geopolitics and economics to offer not only a primer on macroeconomics, but also on how globalization—that is, the process of opening up international markets—has routed the middle class and propped up the elite.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“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

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