An educational, highly useful primer on what’s broken and how to fix it.
A succinct body of essays by knowledgeable, sympathetic observers on the grievances of the Occupy Wall Street protestors.
Byrne (A Genius for Living: The Life of Frieda Lawrence, 1995) organizes the collection into three parts: “How We Got There,” “Where We Are Now” and “Solutions.” Economists Paul Krugman and Robin Wells give a crisp historical overview on how the excoriated “1 percent” quadrupled its real income between 1979 and 2007, leaving America as unequal as it had been on the eve of the Great Depression and unable to implement an adequate government policy because of the recent Congressional paralysis. Philip Dray reminds readers of the “enduring and seminal” legacy of protest movements preceding OWS, such as the Great Rail Strike of 1877 and the spontaneous lunch-counter sit-ins by black students in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960. Michael Hiltzik finds a good lesson in the Townsend movement of 1933, which demanded government attention to the concerns of the aged. Unsurprisingly, the machinations of Wall Street dominate many of the essays: John Cassidy delves into what was good about Wall Street (addressing the capital-raising needs of their clients) and how it went terribly dysfunctional (exploiting instantaneous trading movements), while the reform of the tax system garners vigorous responses, such as those from Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez. Joel Bakan severely scrutinizes the “psychopathic personhood” of corporations, and Eliot Spitzer proposes income-contingent loans for struggling students. Some of the most fleshed-out essays put the OWS protests into a wider worldwide perspective—e.g., Nouriel Roubini’s simplified economics tutorial on the toll of globalization; and Robert M. Buckley’s daring assessment of the parallels between OWS and the pan-European uprisings of 1848. Other notable contributors include Pankaj Mishra, Barbara Ehrenreich, Paul Volcker, Robert Reich, Scott Turow and Jeffrey Sachs.
An educational, highly useful primer on what’s broken and how to fix it.Pub Date: April 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-22021-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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
SEEN & HEARD
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