A knowledgeable appraisal of our current moment featuring sensible options for moving forward—but will policymakers take...
A multipronged plan to transform the United States into a compassionate democracy grounded in economic equality among individuals.
Sitaraman (Director, Law and Government/Vanderbilt Univ.; The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic, 2017, etc.) believes that U.S. history is cyclical and that the time is ripe for a major transformation, in the manner of abolition or the New Deal. The most significant policies within the author’s grand plan would rescue the deteriorating climate before it destroys the planet, balance discriminatory immigration quotas, inject true justice into law enforcement, require national service as a path to unify antagonistic population sectors, and promote responsible journalism both locally and nationally. Some of Sitaraman’s less detailed proposals include effective universal health insurance for U.S. residents and the reduced influence of private-sector corporate behemoths. The author believes that citizen participation in what he terms “the great democracy” would increase vastly through legislation and regulations removing barriers based on geography, race, and access to cultural opportunities. Sitaraman also addresses the possibility that his great democracy might not evolve. Undesirable alternatives include a slightly altered version of what he terms “neoliberalism,” which would solidify economic inequality among individuals based on market-driven capitalism; “nationalist populism,” a way of thinking that led to the rise of Donald Trump; or outright authoritarianism, akin to dictatorship and in ascendancy in numerous nations around the world. Despite cataloging outcomes that he finds alarming, Sitaraman projects hope that the next historical cycle will affirm his agenda. How a reader will react to this monograph will depend heavily on that reader’s inclination to see drinking glasses as half full or half empty. “Optimists hope that generational and demographic change will restore inexorable progress,” writes the author. “Pessimists interpret the current moment as the decline and fall of democracy.”
A knowledgeable appraisal of our current moment featuring sensible options for moving forward—but will policymakers take notice?Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5416-1811-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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