Hopeful and divertingly meaty ruminations, made comprehensible.
Economist editor-in-chief Emmott assays the upcoming 88 years in terms of survival of the world as we know it.
As he showed in his prescient Japanophobia (1993), the author can think like an economist while writing like a journalist—clean, jargon-free prose—and possibly chew gum at the same time. In this effort he suggests (even journalists hedge) answers to two principal questions: Will the US maintain world leadership and continue to keep the peace? And will Capitalism’s benefits outweigh its inevitable downturns to the point where it prevails and spreads? He concludes there’s cause for “paranoid optimism” on both counts, but it’s the application of the economist’s mindset that really makes the exercise worthwhile. In this milieu, the daily headlines and alarums of mass media mean nothing; it’s the long view that counts, the author asserts, and the century from which we have just emerged gave us a wealth of negative examples in intertwined economics and geopolitics not to live by. Economists love stability, it seems, and don’t see any alternative to the benevolent world dictatorship of a dominant power. For example, Emmott agrees that the September 11th attacks were a bona fide tragedy and a horrendous terrorist act, yet it provided the device (he likes the term “prism”) the US needed to focus its military might with “absolute clarity of purpose.” One can almost see in the author’s mind future historians referring to 9/11, like Pearl Harbor, as a “strategic victory.” Poverty and pestilences that give rise to contentious nationalism are the economists’ bugbears. And they actually fidget, Emmott suggests, over things like the rape of a local woman in the vicinity of an overseas base by an American serviceman; a few more of those, after all, and we risk losing stability in the Pacific Rim.
Hopeful and divertingly meaty ruminations, made comprehensible.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-27965-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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