Stern’s T-shirt slogan puts it well: “It’s really not that complicated.” Pipe dream it may be, but this is a book eminently...
Want pie in the sky? How about convincing Americans to accept the “almost un-American” premise of a guaranteed income for all?
It might not be so far-fetched, writes Stern (A Country that Works: Getting America Back on Track, 2006), former president of the Service Employees International Union. Libertarians have agitated for an annual grant to take the place of welfare, while conservatives ought to be on board with the thought that putting a universal basic income in place is a recipe for shrinking social service bureaucracies. As for progressives, it “helps fulfill their dream of ending poverty.” Stern takes a rather roundabout way to get to his central argument, surveying the economy as it has been transformed by technology in the last few years. There are few warehouse jobs today compared to a decade ago, for instance, not just because of the financial collapse, but also because of inventorying techniques made possible only by advanced computers. These days, Kelly Services is responsible for placing not so much stenographers as substitute teachers, taking an onerous and hated job off the backs of already burdened school principals. The argument solidifies with the thesis offered by tech giant Andy Grove that “job creation must be the number one objective of state economic policy,” and job creation follows from the entrepreneurialism unleashed by unencumbered funds. But how much, and how? The specifics are fewer than the diagnostics, but some of the ones that Stern proposes along the way are both interesting and ingenious—encourage offshore companies to return without undue tax penalty, for one, and then set aside some of the proceeds of normal business taxation to fund infrastructure improvements and more. But the overarching one, that of the UBI, is the most interesting of all, and the author does a solid job of making his case without waxing too wild-eyed.
Stern’s T-shirt slogan puts it well: “It’s really not that complicated.” Pipe dream it may be, but this is a book eminently worth talking about.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61039-625-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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