Health care policymakers and medical consumers alike will find these arguments urgent—and in dire need of solution.
Caring for those who cannot care for themselves is at a tipping point—and almost certain to reach a catastrophic state.
British sociologist Dowling observes that in the U.K. between 2012 and 2022, the number of 75-year-olds will have increased by 1 million, and their growing needs for care will not cease. However, she writes, “the forces of capital have become less interested in the reproduction of any national labour force.” In other words, the tenor of the current British government is one of retrenchment, austerity, and, more than anything else, privatization. Dowling’s examples and language—as when she asks, “is lifting bins or driving a lorry more of a skill than looking after elderly or vulnerable people?”—are British through and through, but of course the Brexit Party took many of their marching orders from the same people who gave us Donald Trump, including the thought that government should unknot its welfare net and outsource as many social service jobs as possible. The result, writes the author, is that home care—“never a high-status job in the first place” but at least one that was recognized as necessary and respectable—is now turned over to low-paid, hourly workers who are not reimbursed for time spent traveling from patient to patient and are penalized for spending too much time with any given one. That is, if they’re paid at all; Dowling notes that much care work is now performed by family members without remuneration. The austerity regime, argues the author, achieves its legitimacy, such as it has any, “through a denial of the structural reasons why people need welfare in the first place,” when in fact those needs are expanding owing to “the systematic underfunding of social care.” Among the possible remedies she explores are social-impact investing, community care, decentralization of state mechanisms to fit the needs of local populations, and, of course, more money.
Health care policymakers and medical consumers alike will find these arguments urgent—and in dire need of solution.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-78663-034-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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