Hughes makes a strong case for redistribution of wealth, though the memoir elements of the book are more compelling than the...
A co-founder of Facebook draws from personal experience to propose a guaranteed income for working people.
From a family on the fringes of the middle-class in North Carolina, Hughes earned scholarships at an exclusive prep school and Harvard, where one of his roommates was Mark Zuckerberg. At a time when others were beginning their careers, the author had already cashed out his share of the social media phenomenon, earning nearly $500 million. He raised his personal stock with a key role as the director of online organizing for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. Then he suffered the first major professional setback in his young career. He bought the New Republic and was initially hailed as a savior of the financially beleaguered magazine, but he left four years later with a staff in tatters and the publication in deeper debt. In addition to chronicling his personal story, Hughes offers a manifesto for a guaranteed income of $500 per month for any working adult making less than $50,000, subsidized by those, like himself, who have a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth. He admits that when he mentioned the proposal, “most people would walk away curious at best, suspicious at worst.” But the author maintains that such a small amount of financial security would allow workers to ponder leaving jobs they hate or work in fields where there often are not commensurate financial rewards. Mostly, he writes, it’s the right thing to do, and the country can afford it. “We live in the richest country on Earth at its richest moment in history, even though it might not feel that way to most people,” he writes. And why not? Because “the top one percent of Americans controls nearly 40 percent of the wealth in our country—one and a half times more wealth than the entire bottom 90 percent own.”
Hughes makes a strong case for redistribution of wealth, though the memoir elements of the book are more compelling than the economic analysis.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-19659-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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