Military Spending and Industrial Decline

?Following in the footsteps of Seymour Melman and other critics of the permanent war economy, ' the author attributes the decline of the US industry to a tendency of US governments to encourage unwise allocations of research and development funds for defense purposes, whcih starves other industries of needed research funds; and relatively little spin-off of research findings into other industries despite high research and development expenditures in the defense industries. Nations like Japan and Germany, which have limited defense budgets, have given their machine tool industries an unfair advantage through government assistance to support the growth of these industries. Although the author makes extensive reference to economic theory and provides useful statistical data an the US machine tool industry, his book is more of an appeal for legislation to protect the industry than an authoritative appraisal of the prospects of the industry in the changing world economy.?-Choice