The last few years have seen a veritable torrent of digital-age cheerleading. Books from people like Faith Popcorn and Alvin Toffler have told us that the future will be a playground of opportunity, with fat incomes and satisfying jobs available for all those wise enough to pay attention to emerging trends. But in 1996, with unemployment still high, and downsizing proceeding apace, some are starting to argue that all those happy predictions were just plain wrong.

With their new books, Ann Finlayson and Canadian pollster Angus Reid tackle globalization, technology, and the reigning free-market ethic, with varying success.

Early in Naming Rumpelstiltskin, Finlayson warns readers that some of what they’re about to encounter may sound like conspiracy theory. It does. She paints the big-money operations of the world – the multinational corporations and the bond traders – as cartoonish villains who are holding the Western world hostage, demanding that we give up our social programs if we want to keep eating. On one level, she’s unquestionably correct: the loudest voices arguing for freer markets, fewer regulations, and deeper cuts to government spending are coming from Bay and Wall streets. But Finlayson’s suggestion that a mean-spirited global financial elite deliberately jumped on the recession as an opportunity to eviscerate our social safety net? I, for one, find it a little tough to swallow.

Still, a little paranoia is a good thing, and Finlayson pulls it off with good humour. When she asks the big question – “who benefits?” – about globalization, job-destroying technologies, and cuts to government spending, she goes a long way toward explaining the unemployment crisis. Her solutions, however, are less satisfying, suggesting little more than heavy regulation and increased corporate taxes. Good ideas, sure, but it’s tough to see how they could become official policy in a country where Ralph Klein and Mike Harris hold power.

Reid is less interested in laying blame than Finlayson, but there’s still no love lost between him and Bay Street. For the most part, though, he sees the current tough times more as a product of unstoppable trends than as anything deliberate. Shakedown begins with a list of what Reid calls 10 big myths – “Growth is good for everyone” and “Science and Technology will save us” among them – and a series of convincing arguments that the present wave of change is unstoppable.

Then, in a longish section that veers dangerously close to maudlin nostalgia, he outlines how things used to be, in the “Share and Spend” era that peaked in the 1960s. He describes it as a mix of compassion and selfish acquisition, a time when people liked the idea of big government because their pockets were full and they could afford new cars. When money got tight, though, people came to resent the taxes they’d previously been all too happy to pay. The result? The “Sink or Swim” era.

It’s a nicely argued setup, and Reid embellishes his case with clear examples and years’ worth of his own polling. Shakedown falls down badly in its final pages, however, when Reid tries to suggest solutions. Some vague talk about the need to pay more attention to how things worked when they worked is all well and good, but it’s difficult to see how fond memories of the sixties will help an increasingly unemployed global population. On a sunnier note, Reid points out that Canadians have weathered much tougher times than these, and maintained, through it all, some belief that it’s good to help others. Hardly an action plan, but still comforting words.