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THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY

WILL TECHNOLOGY FORCE US TO CHOOSE BETWEEN PRIVACY AND FREEDOM?

Brin’s writing is eclectic, wandering and fun. Some of what he says is, well, crackpot. But Brin is also no anarchistic...

Self-described crackpot and prolific science-fiction writer Brin (Infinity’s Shore, 1996, etc.) ponders the technological threats to and possibilities for freedom in the not-too-distant future.

Privacy is assailed from all sides today. Electronic surveillance becomes more widespread even as it becomes less intrusive. Data on many aspects of our lives are gathered, bought, and sold. We are enmeshed in a web of electronic noise, a cyberworld of gossiping and snooping. Clearly, say those who would protect our privacy, regulation of such surveillance is necessary. Brin argues just the opposite: Rather than vainly attempting to save privacy, we should strive to create a society that is ever more transparent, ever more exposed. Technology, no matter how we may try to regulate it, will find ever more sophisticated and subtle ways to snoop. And the regulators will have to be regulated by another layer of government watchdogs. So, says Brin, let openness rule. Make bosses as accountable as employees, have government be watched by its citizens as much as it watches. Much as we feel a sense of privacy in the openness of a restaurant, so might a transparent society provide a sense, and the reality, of privacy much better than one in which surveillance is hidden but nevertheless there. Much depends on how humans decide to behave, and while Brin is hardly naive about human nature, he sees that in a society already reasonably tolerant we might reach a point when the private matters of everyone are both readily accessible and simply uninteresting.

Brin’s writing is eclectic, wandering and fun. Some of what he says is, well, crackpot. But Brin is also no anarchistic dreamer, no “cypher punk,” as he puts it. The transparent, unregulated future of freedom is only a possibility, a result of long processes of experimentation and gained wisdom.

Pub Date: May 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-201-32802-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Addison-Wesley

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998

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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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