Warp & Woof
Books in the fabric of everyday life

Your attention... Please!

Stealing a loaf of bread earned Jean Valjean twenty years' worth of free meals -- in prison. The fictional protagonist of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables had the misfortune of living at the tail end of the age of scarcity, just at the dawn of the industrial revolution.

For millions of years, mankind found it impossible to gather or hunt enough food, assemble enough clothing, or build sufficiently warm fires. But in the past two hundred years -- the blink of an eye -- the industrialized economies have completely "solved" the problem of production, leading to an era of overabundance not ever before seen by human beings. The problem now? How to get someone to sample your goods: Your attention...Please!!!

The rise of the industrial world is well described in The Age of Capital (Vintage, 1996) by Eric Hobsbawm, professor emeritus of history at the University of London. Although the writing's a bit leaden, the book is still useful.

Neo-conservative Michael Novak -- who originally set out to be a Catholic priest -- defends capitalism and makes claims to its moral superiority in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (Touchstone, 1983). I think it does a great job of explaining why capitalism goes beyond cold pragmatics and is inherently humane. But I once gave it to a woman studying to be a minister. An ardent supporter of liberation theology, she was so incensed by the book that it made her cry.

The uncertain, changing nature of business today is described by business guru Charles Handy in The Age of Unreason (Harvard Business School Press, 1990). In his call for "upside-down thinking" to meet the challenges of change in the current business world, one can see the destabilizing consequences of overabundance.