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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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