The city of Binghamton tends to get lost in the many detours, but the side trips are mostly pleasurable, informative and...
An evolutionary biologist applies his science to making the city of Binghamton, N.Y., a better place to live, and in the telling, illuminates evolution and spells out his efforts to increase understanding of it.
Wilson (Biology and Anthropology/Binghamton Univ.; Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, 2007, etc.) argues that the evolutionary paradigm can explain cultural as well as biological diversity, and by applying science one can use evolutionary theory to solve everyday problems. He has chosen his city of Binghamton to demonstrate how regularly analyzing a city as a multicellular organism can provide the information needed to bring about effective changes. His first task, gathering information, involved putting results of an attitude questionnaire into a geographical information system in order to create a civic virtue map showing the relative well-being of neighborhoods—that is, how social and supportive they were. To test the map’s validity, Wilson and his colleagues also took photographs, conducted lost-letter experiments and tallied the number of Halloween and Christmas decorations and garage sales. Further research is now adding genetic information to his database, and he plans to include a study of spirituality and religion. To create the environmental changes needed to initiate behavioral changes in neighborhoods with low well-being ratings, he launched the Binghamton Neighborhood Project, a collaboration between the university and community partners to improve the quality of life on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. A current initiative is the Design Your Own Park competition. In this wide-ranging and highly readable account, Wilson also regales readers with chatty essays on social insects, gentle profiles of colleagues, a capsule history of Seventh Day Adventism and stories of professional growth and accomplishment: his launching of an evolutionary studies program at Binghamton University, his role in founding the think tank Evolution Institute, even his wife’s research on crows.
The city of Binghamton tends to get lost in the many detours, but the side trips are mostly pleasurable, informative and worthwhile.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-03767-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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