Brown, P. Lauder, H, & Ashton, D. The Global Auction. The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes. Oxford University Press, New York, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-19-973168-8 Pages: 208.

The authors of this volume describe their purpose as attempting to understand the future of the ‘American Dream’, or what may arguably today also be the European, Chinese or Indian Dream. To do this, they assert that any effective analysis must look beyond national borders, given the highly integrated and networked reality of contemporary global economic activity. The authors draw on a decade of research and nearly 200 interviews with corporate executives and national policy makers in the United States and Britain, China, Germany, India, Singapore, and South Korea, ultimately articulating an “inconvenient truth”, namely “that the opportunity bargain based on better education, better jobs and better incomes can no longer deliver the American Dream”.  The promise of the middle class is everywhere under threat from a “global auction” of educated talent. The situation calls for new ways of thinking about how individuals might forge meaningful paths for themselves in this context, and how the global economy might work in ways that can benefit more people, more widely.

Oxford University Press