Ted Fishman

Shock of Gray: The Aging of the World’s Population and How It Pits Young against Old, Child against Parent, Worker against Boss, Company against Rival, and Nation against Nation

The world’s population is rapidly aging—by the year 2030, one billion people will be sixty-five or older. As the ratio of the old to the young grows ever larger, global aging has gone critical: For the first time in history, the number of people over age fifty will be greater than those under age seventeen. Few of us understand the resulting massive effects on economies, jobs, and families. Everyone is touched by this issue—parents and children, rich and poor, retirees and workers—and now veteran journalist Ted C. Fishman masterfully and movingly explains how our world is being altered in ways no one ever expected.

What happens when too few young people must support older people? How do shrinking families cope with aging loved ones?

What happens when countries need millions of young workers but lack them? How do companies compete for young workers? Why, exactly, do they shed old workers?

How are entire industries being both created and destroyed by demographic change? How do communities and countries remake themselves for ever-growing populations of older citizens? Who will suffer? Who will benefit?

With vivid and witty reporting from American cities and around the world, and through compelling interviews with families, employers, workers, economists, gerontologists, government officials, health-care professionals, corporate executives, and small business owners, Fishman reveals the astonishing and interconnected effects of global aging, and why nations, cultures, and crucial human relationships are changing in this timely, brilliant, and important read.

China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World

China today is visible everywhere — in the news, in the economic pressures battering the globe, in our workplaces, and in every trip to the store. Provocative, timely, and essential — and updated with new statistics and information — this dramatic account of China’s growing dominance as an industrial superpower by journalist Ted C. Fishman explains how the profound shift in the world economic order has occurred — and why it already affects us all.

How has an enormous country once hobbled by poverty and Communist ideology come to be the supercharged center of global capitalism? What does it mean that China now grows three times faster than the United States? Why do nearly all of the world’s biggest companies have large operations in China? What does the corporate march into China mean for workers left behind in America, Europe, and the rest of the world?

Meanwhile, what makes China’s emerging corporations so dangerously competitive? What will happen when China manufactures nearly everything — computers, cars, jumbo jets, and pharmaceuticals — that the United States and Europe can, at perhaps half the cost? How do these developments reach around the world and straight into all of our lives?

These are ground-shaking questions, and China, Inc. provides answers.

Veteran journalist Ted C. Fishman shows how China will force all of us to make big changes in how we think about ourselves as consumers, workers, citizens, and even as parents. The result is a richly engaging work of penetrating, up-to-the-minute reportage and brilliant analysis that will forever change how readers think about America’s future.