An informative and thought-provoking framework for reckoning with total costs.
Bainbridge presents an argument for a new approach to accounting and sustainability in this nonfiction work.
The author argues that fighting climate change requires acknowledging the true cost of products, practices, and decisions beyond their literal dollar value and ensuring that this full cost is borne by those responsible for it. The book advocates a revamped system of accounting that includes external costs, assigns a monetary value to indirect costs, and factors in the full value of natural resources and intangible inputs. While the focus is primarily on environmental implications, Bainbridge’s system also incorporates working conditions, health care, and community impact. After a comprehensive overview, subsequent chapters explain how the system applies to specific industries like agriculture, construction, and energy. The book provides examples of cases in which governments have successfully imposed financial penalties for destructive actions, such as fees charged for pesticide and fertilizer use in Scandinavia. It also details the elements of a true cost report, used to assess and convey the all-inclusive cost of an activity (the author provides guidance on how to create one). Bainbridge is an extremely knowledgeable author, and although the text can appear dense, he is skilled at crafting coherent explanations of complex topics and turning piles of data into a narrative. The book does an excellent job of providing specific examples of true costs, including a multipage enumeration of the differences between a conventional fast-food restaurant burger and a bison burger that demonstrates how their costs go beyond the price listed on the menu. There are occasional moments of clever phrasing (“A few years from now, when people ask what happened to Arizona’s water, the answer will be, ‘the Saudi cows ate it’ ”), but overall the prose is simple, clear, and unaffected. Although the book deals primarily with large structural issues—Bainbridge does not pretend that it will be easy to adopt a new system of accounting—it also offers actionable tips for readers looking to reduce their own true costs on a small, manageable scale.
An informative and thought-provoking framework for reckoning with total costs.Pub Date: June 14, 2023
ISBN: 9798987261927
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Rio Redondo Press
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
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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