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THE NEW BETTER OFF

REINVENTING THE AMERICAN DREAM

Martin writes with conviction and enthusiasm; whether social scientists concur with her remains to be seen.

An exploration of how success in the United States is being redefined.

“When the economy crashed,” writes On Being weekly columnist Martin (Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists, 2010, etc.), “the air was let out of the overinflated ego of the so-called American Dream.” The author questions the popular notion that the next generation will not be as well off as their parents. For her, the expression “better off” does not refer to a powerful job or a big salary but rather a better life—i.e., a life lived in a supportive, creative community. Her basic message is that community is everything. Success is measured not in money but in relationships, by economic and social ties in the places where you live and where you work. Martin, who lives with her husband and young daughter in Temescal Commons, a co-housing community in Oakland, California, is enthusiastic about the benefits of living in such a community, arguing that when people’s lives become rooted in communities, they focus less on themselves and put more of their energy into creative ways to help a group make everyone’s lives easier, healthier, and more fun. In such a setting, with its built-in safety net, Martin sees how the lost art of neighborliness is recovered and new rituals marking life events are created. As a feminist, she welcomes the breaking down of traditional gender roles that communal living can generate. Through profiles of participants, stories of her personal experiences, and reports on her research, the author creates a vivid portrait of the new “better off” that she believes is happening now and has the potential for further growth in the future. Though the author’s premise is not necessarily new, she makes it sound undoubtedly appealing.

Martin writes with conviction and enthusiasm; whether social scientists concur with her remains to be seen.

Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-58005-579-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Seal Press

Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

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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