Volume 29, Number 5 · April 1, 1982
How to Rescue a Drowning Economy
By Lester C. Thurow
Minding America's Business: The Decline and Rise of the American Economy
by Ira C. Magaziner, by Robert B. Reich
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 387 pp., $25.00
America does not need economic planning if planning means the centralized, detailed, input-output planning associated with the Soviet Union. America does need planning, however, if planning means the strategic coordination of planning associated with a corporate finance committee in a large corporation. Corporate finance committees do not plan the detailed activities of the various divisions in a large firm, but they exercise strategic judgments on where the firm should expand when they allocate investment funds. Some kinds of activities are pushed as the 'growth areas' of the future; others are milked as cash cows with none of their earnings plowed back into future expansion.
Review, 2282 words
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