Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
Author: Laurie Garrett
In this meticulously researched and ultimately explosive new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of The Coming Plague, Laurie Garrett takes on perhaps the most crucial global issue of our time. She asks: Is our collective health in a state of decline? If so, how dire is this crisis, and has the public health system itself contributed to it? Using riveting detail and finely honed storytelling, Garrett exposes the underbelly of the world's globalization to find out if it can still be assumed that government can and will protect the people's health, or if that trust has been irrevocably broken.
Foreign Affairs
This book is a twin, in many ways, of the author's best-selling The Coming Plague -- interesting, sprawling, heavily anecdotal, and amply footnoted . . . Once extracted, however, the message remains an important one old scourges tuberculosis and syphilis are alive and all too well and newer ones AIDS, most notably have yet to abate their force . . . a useful warning that globalization may have a very dark side indeed.
Publishers Weekly
On a par with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, this chilling exploration of the decline of public health should be taken seriously by leaders and policy makers around the world. Garrett, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for Newsday (The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance), has written an accessible and prodigiously researched analysis of disaster in the making in a world with no functioning public health infrastructure.
Journal of American Medical Association - Thomas J. Coates
Prescient is the right word for Laurie Garrett's Betrayal of Trust. It would be an understatement to say that the US response to anthrax deaths has left much to be desired. Worse yet, those deaths and the specter of bioterrorism have exposed all of the weaknesses in the public health system that Garrett has documented in her usual meticulous and intelligent style. Her thesis is that the health of the public is part of the compact between citizens and their governments and that governments have broken the compact; hence, they no longer deserve the essential trust of those citizens. Furthermore, she documents how the solutions to today's major health problems are nontechnological and that the local is linked intimately with the global.
Publishers Weekly
On a par with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, this chilling exploration of the decline of public health should be taken seriously by leaders and policymakers around the world. Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for Newsday (The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance), has written an accessible and prodigiously researched analysis of disaster in the making in a world with no functioning public health infrastructure. In India in 1994, neglect of public health for the poor led to an outbreak of pneumonic plague; the once-dreaded disease is now easily treatable with antibiotics, but the failure of Indian authorities to quickly reach a diagnosis and provide accurate information resulted in a worldwide panic. The former Soviet Union, for all its flaws, according to Garrett, assured every citizen access to health care. After the U.S.S.R.'s breakup, the Russian economy collapsed. With no funding left for health care, Russia was overwhelmed by a tuberculosis epidemic. Even the U.S., historically a pioneer in public health (this commitment was demonstrated by New York City's quick and successful response to an 1888 cholera epidemic, as well as the tenement reform movement of the early 1900s that helped eliminate diphtheria), is lagging today. During the Reagan administration, Garrett says, budget cuts dramatically weakened public health while also denying poor Americans access to medical care. The author believes that the medical challenges posed by the epidemic spread of AIDS in Africa, by drug-resistant microbes carried from one country to another and by the danger of biological warfare can be met only by a cooperative global movement dedicated to strengthening public health infrastructures. Garrett sounds the alarm with an articulate and carefully reasoned account. Author tour; NBC Today appearance. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Turning her attention to the frightening condition of public health throughout the world, Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter Garrett repeats the call for action she initiated in her tremendously successful The Coming Plague. Re-emerging diseases, antibiotic-resistant superbugs, and biological terrorism are increasing threats that can only be conquered through significant attention to worldwide public health. Garrett provides an in-depth look at public health programs in several different geographic areas and analyzes their successes and failures. The author shows clearly that successful public health programs require a fragile bond of trust between the people and their government, and she details the critical effects of politics and economics on public health infrastructures. Her endnotes, which might constitute a book in themselves, offer a tremendous resource for additional research. Completely readable for general readers and experts alike, this reasonably priced book is highly recommended for all libraries.--Tina Neville, Univ. of South Florida Lib., St. Petersburg Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
New York Times Book Review - Fitzhugh Mullan
These are lurid, disturbing and well-documented images that are not easily dismissed as alarmist. . . . But it is Garrett's observations about the United States that are the most disturbing. . . . [Her message] is a momentous one that is delivered persuasively.
Business Week - Arnst
In this spectacularly well-researched and well-argued follow up (to 1994's The Coming Plague) Garrett details how poorly prepared the world's public health-care systems are to deal with outbreaks of disease.
New interesting book: Análisis de Inversión y Dirección de Carpeta (con Thomson UN - Negocio S
How We Compete: What Companies Around the World Are Doing to Make It in Today's Global Economy
Author: Suzanne Berger
"Impressive... This is an evidence-based bottom-up account of the realities of globalisation. It is more varied, more subtle, and more substantial than many of the popular works available on the subject." — Financial Times
Based on a five-year study by the MIT Industrial Performance Center, How We Compete goes into the trenches of over 500 international companies to discover which practices are succeeding in today’s global economy, which are failing –and why.
There is a rising fear in America that no job is safe. In industry after industry, jobs seem to be moving to low-wage countries in Asia, Central America, and Eastern Europe. Production once handled entirely in U.S. factories is now broken into pieces and farmed out to locations around the world. To discover whether our current fears about globalization are justified, Suzanne Berger and a group of MIT researchers went to the front lines, visiting workplaces and factories around the world. They conducted interviews with managers at more than 500 companies, asking questions about which parts of the manufacturing process are carried out in their own plants and which are outsourced, who their biggest competitors are, and how they plan to grow their businesses. How We Compete presents their fascinating, and often surprising, conclusions.
Berger and her team examined businesses where technology changes rapidly–such as electronics and software–as well as more traditional sectors, like the automobile industry, clothing, and textile industries. They compared the strategies and success of high-tech companies like Intel and Sony, who manufacturetheir products in their own plants, and Cisco and Dell, who rely primarily on outsourcing. They looked closely at textile and clothing to uncover why some companies, including the Gap and Liz Claiborne, choose to outsource production to foreign countries, while others, such as Zara and Benetton, base most operations at home.
What emerged was far more complicated than the black-and-white picture presented by promoters and opponents of globalization. Contrary to popular belief, cheap labor is not the answer, and the world is not flat, as Thomas Friedman would have it. How We Compete shows that there are many different ways to win in the global economy, and that the avenues open to American companies are much wider than we ever imagined.
SUZANNE BERGER is the Raphael Dorman and Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science at MIT and director of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative. She was a member of the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity, whose report Made in America analyzed weaknesses and strengths in U.S. industry in the 1980s. She lives in Boston , Massachusetts.
Foreign Affairs
This book summarizes and generalizes from interviews with 500 enterprises conducted between 1999 and 2004 by the Industrial Performance Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It offers a vivid, and highly variegated, bottom-up view of what globalization actually means — and does not mean — for firms operating in an increasingly competitive global setting. To focus their work, the interviewers concentrated mainly on the electronics and software industry, the textiles and apparel industry, and the automotive industry — all of which are increasingly global, although at different paces and in rather different ways. Economic activity, including manufacturing, has become increasingly modular, with bits of the chain from original idea to final product taking place in different firms, sometimes in different countries. Contrary to some claims, low wages do not necessarily attract firms to countries, since they are usually associated with low skills, low productivity, and poor quality control. Moreover, firms do not lose their nationality when they venture abroad. Each successful firm has a distinctive legacy, the research team found, and needs to draw on it to thrive. Firms must identify and concentrate on their distinctive skills, farming out other activities to specialized firms, some of which may be in other countries. The book itself is cited as an example of modular production: a German-owned American publishing house contracted out six different activities to bring out the book.
Table of Contents:
| Ch. 1 | Who's afraid of globalization? | 3 |
| Ch. 2 | A preview of the MIT globalization study | 29 |
| Ch. 3 | Breaking up the corporation | 59 |
| Ch. 4 | The new American model | 73 |
| Ch. 5 | The dilemma : should you stay or should you go? | 93 |
| Ch. 6 | Making it cheaper | 113 |
| Ch. 7 | Tracking strategies from the grass roots up | 139 |
| Ch. 8 | Brand-name firms, no-name manufacturers, and everything in between | 165 |
| Ch. 9 | Made in America? | 201 |
| Ch. 10 | Building on a legacy at home | 229 |
| Ch. 11 | Lessons from the field | 251 |
| Ch. 12 | Beyond the company | 278 |
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