A hopeful book that generally fails to close the gap between our current situation and what Speth envisions for future...
A longtime environmental policymaker and activist suggests a sweeping plan to save the United States by revamping the entire political-economic-societal paradigm.
Speth served as the environmental advisor to President Jimmy Carter and is currently a Vermont Law School professor. His two previous books—Red Sky at Morning (2005) and The Bridge at the End of the World (2008)—were the first two installments in what can be considered a trilogy. He opens America the Possible with a familiar catalog of America's ills, including environmental degradation, overdependence on fossil fuels, second-rate health care, income inequality, the unfair tax system and the hegemony of multinational corporations. Speth concedes that his agenda is daunting, and he suggests that it probably could not be fully achieved until at least 2050, even if a majority of voters could be assembled to support it. However, because he believes the country is in danger of failing the greater part of its citizenry unless current policies are altered, he chooses optimism, proposing specific reforms that can become reality if undertaken in a deliberate, measured way. Speth understands that the populace must move beyond an electoral choice between the equally hidebound Republican and Democratic parties, and he calls for a uniting of political progressives to form an electoral majority. The biggest weakness of Speth’s argument is his vagueness in showing how to persuade tens of millions of registered voters to coalesce into a progressive political movement. The author admits that it has been difficult to bring even like-minded individuals together, and he explains why environmentalists and social-justice liberals focusing on employee rights in the job market have too often failed to work in tandem.
A hopeful book that generally fails to close the gap between our current situation and what Speth envisions for future generations.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-18076-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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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