An eye-opening view of a vast sector of the economy that lies in the shadows but has undue influence, for ill or good.
Intriguing look at the world of big-ticket philanthropy, which shows promise of surpassing much governmental social-service spending in the near future.
Political journalist and Demos think-tank founder Callahan (Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America, 2010, etc.) opens with a moment that caused an odd flurry of controversy when it was announced a little more than a year ago: when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife pledged to use 99 percent of their shares on charity spending, they set off a wave of discussion and objection for what some perceived as “tax avoidance and an undemocratic power grab.” Whatever the merits of that view, Callahan reminds us that the sum in question, totaling about $45 billion, is greater than the budgets of about two-thirds of all American states—and in that sense alone a harbinger of the future, since most of those cash-strapped states are not the place to look for relief for such things as medical research or meaningful education reform. The best part of Callahan’s book is not its account of the various players in this mega-giving, the Zuckerbergs and Bill Gateses of the world, but instead his view of the machinery that has grown up to surround big giving. In the case of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for example, some 2,500 employees disburse more than $700 million per year, an activity that, given the depth of its pockets, may go on for hundreds more years, effectively in perpetuity. The thorniest problem that Callahan explores is not the good that such philanthropies do but the larger import of what happens when the rich get to decide what’s important to fund. “Even when wealthy donors are expanding debates,” he writes, “true to the spirit of pluralism, we can’t forget that it’s they who are choosing which voices and ideas get extra juice.”
An eye-opening view of a vast sector of the economy that lies in the shadows but has undue influence, for ill or good.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-94705-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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