鍾漢清加入英國戴明協會（BDA）。認識 David Kerridge 教授，深受關愛。獲創始會長 Henry R. Neave 博士贈其佳作The Deming Dimension 。他們都有紀念Deming之專文，David的登在歐洲 EOQC 的季刊；Henry的可在www.spcpress.com找到。
This classic is the definitive book written about Dr. Deming and his work. The author and Dr. Deming were friends and colleagues who worked together to be sure that readers would clearly understand the principles and philosophy developed and taught by Dr. Deming over the course of a half century. The book begins with a first-rate historical perspective and then goes on to explain the basic tenets of the Deming philosophy, including such topics as The Fourteen Points, The Deadly Diseases, The Obstacles, and the System of Profound Knowledge (updated shortly before Deming's death in 1993). Dr. Neave has powerfully communicated both the message and its importance to the business world of today.
440 pages. Paperback. $20.00
0-945320-36-1
978-0-945320-36-4
Robert Solow on powerful families’ threat to democratic institutions.
WWW.THEATLANTIC.COM
Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: We're Headed for Oligarchy
Robert Solow on powerful families’ threat to democratic institutions.
In a recent interview at the Economic Policy Institute, Nobel Prize-Winning economist and MIT professor Robert Solow riffed on the political effects of increasing inequality and concentration of wealth at the very top. "If that kind of concentration of wealth continues, then we get to be more and more an oligarchical country, a country that's run from the top," he said.
This is a proposal that Solow cheers. But there is one problem:
Piketty writes as if a tax on wealth might sometime soon have political viability in Europe, where there is already some experience with capital levies. I have no opinion about that. On this side of the Atlantic, there would seem to be no serious prospect of such an outcome. We are politically unable to preserve even an estate tax with real bite. If we could, that would be a reasonable place to start, not to mention a more steeply progressive income tax that did not favor income from capital as the current system does. But the built-in tendency for the top to outpace everyone else will not yield to minor patches.
And this is, perhaps, the most significant point. Piketty has identified the mechanism by which inequality accelerates over time (Solow calls it, simply, the “rich-get-richer dynamic"). But the consequences of that distribution are not merely economic but political: A concentration of wealth leads to a concentration of power, which in turn protects the concentration of power. That our political system is incapable of tempering Piketty's dynamic is not a bizarre coincidence but a direct result.
"Wouldn’t it be interesting," Solow asks in his TNRreview, "if the United States were to become the land of the free, the home of the brave, and the last refuge of increasing inequality at the top (and perhaps also at the bottom)? Would that work for you?"
