Impressive in scope and alternately inspiring and depressing.
An economist and a novelist team up to show that when women don’t flourish, neither does the GDP.
Drawing in part on data from the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law project, Georgetown School of Foreign Service senior fellow Lopez-Claros, the former director of Global Indicators at the World Bank and chief economist at the World Economic Forum, and Nakhjavani (Us&Them, 2017, etc.) argue that discussions of sexism must take economics into account, because the actual “price we are paying for inequality is too high.” With almost overwhelming force, the authors demonstrate the widespread persistence of gender inequality. As they note, in more than a dozen countries, husbands can legally prevent women from accepting paid employment; in Africa and South Asia, too few girls attend secondary school; and nearly 40 percent of people surveyed in 60 countries over four years agree that, when jobs are scarce, men should have more rights to paid employment than women. Lopez-Claros and Nakhjavani go on to demonstrate the economic consequences of inequality. For example, violence against women is commonplace, and female victims have diminished economic productivity. What’s to be done? Some of the authors’ conclusions are unsurprising—e.g., women who have control over reproduction have greater career choice. In their attempt to address religiously motivated gender discrimination, the authors blandly and patronizingly suggest that “perhaps the time has come to distinguish between the universal principles in all faiths and the cultural mirages we elevate to the level of religious doctrine.” They are more persuasive—and more energizing—when they offer specific policy ideas, such as the suggestion that state-sponsored pensions and health care could reduce “gendercide.” As they point out, the belief that sons are necessary protections against the economic ravages of aging often animates couples’ preferences for sons (and their practice of sex-selective abortion).
Impressive in scope and alternately inspiring and depressing.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-05118-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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