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THE MEANING OF THE 21ST CENTURY

A VITAL BLUEPRINT FOR ENSURING OUR FUTURE

Martin concludes that things may just work out. Fans of H.G. Wells will enjoy the argument, which is definitely not for...

There’s good news and bad news: We’re destroying the planet, and some of us are going to succeed.

There’s more than a little Buckminster Fullerish optimism—and off-kilter ideas—in Martin’s take on the state of the world, though the reader has to work through some very grim statistics indeed. For one, it takes 1,000 tons of water to make the ton of grain necessary to produce 18 pounds of beef—and around the planet, we’re using 160 billion tons more water each year than is replenished by rainfall. For another, “one-third of the world’s forest areas has disappeared since 1950, and the destruction is accelerating.” To top it off, China and India are becoming well-to-do enough to want a car in every garage, which will exacerbate the fuel crisis. Enter technology, soft (solar panels) and hard (genetic retooling) alike, to the rescue. Martin, a former IBM engineer who lives part-time on a waterless island off Bermuda, marvels that America does not harvest rainwater, though it is easy to do so; he urges that China and other nations move to nuclear power rather than burn more coal, which “would have a devastating effect on the world’s climate”; and the like. Moreover, he opens a window onto some weird-science possibilities, including “electronic brain appendages” that may help us think our way through to a solution of trifles like global warming and mass extinction. In the face of doom, Martin has a positive outlook that sometimes verges on Pollyanna territory, as when he predicts that by 2050, “most of the world will be familiar with its diverse cultures,” so much so that we’ll stop shooting at each other. That, and the prospect that medicine will make Methuselahs of today’s youngsters, may mean yet more people on this busy planet.

Martin concludes that things may just work out. Fans of H.G. Wells will enjoy the argument, which is definitely not for Luddites.

Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2006

ISBN: 1-57322-323-9

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

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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