Those whose politics differ from Hinton’s will likely be inclined to quarrel with her diagnosis, but they’ll be obliged to...
A Harvard historian examines the origins of “the foremost civil rights issue of our time.”
Over the past two years, deadly confrontations between police and young African-Americans, the demonstrations and movements these incidents inspired, and subsequent commentaries by writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates have forced the issues of aggressive police practices and mass incarceration to the forefront of our national consciousness. Now comes Hinton (History and African and African-American Studies/Harvard Univ.; co-editor: The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction, 2011) to remind us that these problems were a long time in the making. As the author demonstrates, President Richard Nixon’s war on crime, Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, and George W. Bush’s war on terror played roles in ratcheting up the militarization of police forces and the surveillance of the inner city. All contributed mightily to the vastly disproportionate numbers of African-Americans and Latinos currently filling our prisons. But Hinton goes even further back to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and the unfortunate yoking of anti-poverty legislation with anti-crime laws. This unprecedented infusion of the federal government’s authority, muscle, and dollars into crime prevention—primarily through the aegis of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration—distorted and eventually overwhelmed efforts to combat unemployment, address housing, and improve education. Academic readers will appreciate Hinton’s archival deep dive into the various and successive congressional acts responsible, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes not, for what amounts in her terms to criminalizing poverty. She discusses the prevailing social science theories that informed those laws—James Q. Wilson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan take a beating—and frequently cites official reports and informal intergovernmental communications that expose the policymakers’ thinking. General readers will be appalled at her portrayal of outrageous police practices, all fueled with LEAA money, that contributed to the agency’s reputation as a “bureaucratic monster.”
Those whose politics differ from Hinton’s will likely be inclined to quarrel with her diagnosis, but they’ll be obliged to grapple with her fact-filled, scholarly argument.Pub Date: May 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-674-73723-5
Page Count: 438
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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
SEEN & HEARD
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