The Global Auction

"A brilliant new book."--Andrew Reinbach, The Huffington Post "The Global Auction is a must-read for parents, college students, and policymakers. It poses a central contradiction. We press the message to our children: 'Study. Get degrees. Get a good job. And you will live the good life.' And policymakers reinforce the drumbeat by insisting that more and better education is necessary to stay ahead of our economic competitors. But such claims have become platitudes for many individuals, dramatically at odds with the realities of income stagnation and poor job prospects. The authors explain how this dramatic breakdown between rhetoric and reality happened and how we might reconstruct an alternative future in which education becomes meaningful and fulfilling in its own right." --Henry M. Levin, William H. Kilpatrick Professor of Economics & Education, Columbia University "This is a challenging and very timely book. Written in an arresting, graphic style, it calls into question the comfortable belief that global capitalism can be a source of endlessly rising upward mobility in western societies, provided only that these societies continue with programs of educational expansion and reform. The gauntlet is thrown down to economists wedded to human capital theory and to sociologists who see education as the great engine of social mobility." --John Goldthorpe, Emeritus Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford University "The Global Auction deals with one of the most pressing issues of our times: how the significant expansion in the labor supply available to multinational corporations is leading to dramatic shifts in the location of employment around the world. It draws on years of in-depth research, offering valuable insights for both academics and business leaders." --David Finegold, Dean, School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey "Brown, Lauder, and Ashton's book is brilliantly argued and provides a wakeup call to global citizens everywhere. There is no substitute for the regulation of global capitalism in the interests of the many rather than the few, and this book slams the door on the last set of excuses for maintaining the current system--that somehow the educated will escape the race to the bottom." --Kevin Leicht, Professor of Sociology, University of Iowa "This provocative volume argues that the predicted and promised benefits of the knowledge economy have been illusory for most college-educated workers in the developed world, and that the continuation of neoliberal globalization is likely to bring more of the same." --CHOICE