An important wake-up call with solid historical context.
How the U.S. lost its lead in the crucial area of microchip manufacturing and how it might be reclaimed.
Without microchips, entire industries can grind to a halt. “Most of the world’s GDP is produced with devices that rely on semiconductors,” writes Miller, who teaches international history at Tufts. “For a product that didn’t exist seventy-five years ago, this is an extraordinary ascent.” While it was primarily American scientists and entrepreneurs who created the industry, American chip manufacturing has lagged behind in recent years. Production happens in surprisingly few places, with one of the most important being Taiwan, where the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company provides 37% of the world’s logic chips and 11% of the world’s memory chips. Miller notes that in the early years of chip manufacture, when most of the painstaking work was done by hand, high labor costs in the U.S. pushed producers to look overseas, first to Japan. But then Japan became a major competitor. An answer was to undercut the Japanese firms by finding countries with even lower labor costs, such as South Korea and Taiwan. Eventually, those countries became competitors as well as partners. American tech firms were willing to send chip manufacture offshore so they could focus on their strengths of innovation and design. Apple, for example, is a major user of chips but makes absolutely none. As Miller shows, the problem with this globalization strategy is China, which has long sought to build its own chip industry, with mixed results. From Beijing’s perspective, Taiwan’s chip factories make the island an even more tempting target. Though the author doesn’t make any clear policy proposals, his implicit message to U.S. policymakers is to recognize the danger and act accordingly. America’s tech lead is shrinking, so the time has come to develop policies to ensure that the secret machinery of the digital era continues to operate smoothly.
An important wake-up call with solid historical context.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982172-00-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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