A well-researched, sobering view of the damage that Americans’ need to get high wreaks on our neighbors.
A decadeslong survey of the Mexican drug trade and the myths surrounding it.
The pipelines that bring illicit narcotics from Mexico have been flowing since the late 19th century, writes historian Smith, a time when “between 2 and 4 percent of the U.S. population was addicted to morphine.” A century later, “America was consuming up to 70 percent of all the world’s cocaine.” Some of the myths that have arisen paint the drug trade as an evil assault on an innocent America, perpetuated by the worst of humankind against a cadre of honest cops, a tide that provides “the essential background for the upsurge in U.S. nativism, the expansion of a massive deportation industry, and the popularity of Trump’s demands for a wall.” The truth is more nuanced, but it centers on economics. Without the ever voracious American market, there would be no drug trade—and the current trend toward legalizing at least marijuana and the decline in cocaine consumption are forcing the trade into new product lines, including fentanyl, methamphetamine, and opioids. Meanwhile, writes Smith, the drug trade was long intertwined with the Mexican state; since almost all of the traffic passed through to the north, who would object to politicians skimming off the top? But the politicians have given way to the drug traffickers themselves, who now “decide the rules of the game,” which Smith describes as “state capture.” With a few exceptions (such the Sinaloa cartel kingpin Chapo Guzmán), the bosses escape punishment even as the trade has turned increasingly violent. Smith does a fine job of piecing all these elements together, showing how the American market led to the boom of border towns such as the once-sleepy hamlet of Tijuana and how hard-line anti-drug policies do not bring down consumption rates. Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of dead and disappeared in Mexico, collateral damage of the drug war, can be laid at the door of the U.S.—where, as Smith notes, the guns that the gangsters employ come from.
A well-researched, sobering view of the damage that Americans’ need to get high wreaks on our neighbors.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-324-00655-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
SEEN & HEARD
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