A wildly frustrating and timely book appropriate for most readers.
Using a couple of heroes and more than a few foils, journalist Rivlin (The Godfather of Silicon Valley: Ron Conway and the Fall of the Dot-coms, 2001, etc.) dives into the dog-eat-dog world of Poverty, Inc.
Amid the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, countless captains of the poverty industry continue to thrive on the measly paychecks of working-class citizens. Check cashers, payday lenders (who used to be called “loan sharks”) and pawnbrokers spread throughout the United States, cropping up in low-income neighborhoods like weeds. Allan Jones, Chairman and CEO of Check Into Cash, is one of those weeds. He is also a world-class finger-pointer. According to Jones, the 2008 global collapse is the fault of one man: Martin Eakes, “who, in the mid-1990s, convinced the Federal National Mortgage Association—Fannie Mae—to help his organization, the Center for Community Self-Help, create a first-of-its-kind secondary market to buy and sell subprime mortgages.” Eakes did make subprime loans as far back as 1984, but Self-Help drew a line at targeting uneducated people living on fixed incomes, payday’s so-called “perfect customers.” Payday lenders sprung up in 1996, when the Ohio legislature “voted to exempt small, short-term loans from the state’s 28 percent usury cap, thereby legalizing payday lending.” Once the banks started buying up payday and cash-advance businesses, they went to work in Washington with a bipartisan group of lobbyists. Even a former chief of staff for Clinton served on a board of “swat team” advisors for Household Finance Corp., one the most infamous and cavalier subprime lenders. Recent legislation has managed to temper the more extreme interest rates, but the weeds continue to sprout despite measures to stomp them out. One crude and ironic point driven home capably by Rivlin is the fact that as long as the working poor need money, payday lenders will be there “help.” As a now-bankrupt former millionaire put it, “You can make more money off the rich but it carries a much bigger risk…The thing about the poor people’s economy…is that basically it’s recession proof. You’re always going to have people who need $100 or $200 real quick.”
A wildly frustrating and timely book appropriate for most readers.Pub Date: June 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-173321-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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