A hackle-raising book about nature and human nature, venality and justice, and how disasters—before, during, and...
How the most significant deleterious factor in natural disasters may be the human element.
“Disasters can conceal as much as they reveal,” writes Mutter (Earth and Environmental Sciences, International and Public Affairs/Columbia Univ.) in this plainspoken but urgent book. The author examines the intersection of the tragic loss of life and livelihood with civic irresponsibility and personal/institutional venality, played out through ill-preparedness and opportunistic aftermaths of the event. In doing so, Mutter endeavors to approach disasters panoptically, considering both sides of what he calls the Feynman line: that the natural and social sciences are inextricably linked in how we contend with hazards and disasters. It has everything to do with wealth, poverty, vulnerability, resilience, corruption, cronyism, racism, and a whole cacophony of social ills. Mutter frames matters clearly: capital works for its holders, who ensure that their capital grows by being close to the center of power in order to manipulate policy and lawmaking to their advantage. Think of the former vice president, Dick Cheney, who ran “Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, which...received tens of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts for reconstruction work” after Hurricane Katrina. Mutter presents a wealth of material evidence as well as social science theory—using the United States, Haiti, and Myanmar as examples—to explain how the elite class, without oversight, makes decisions as to where and what will be rebuilt, allocates lucrative contracts, and exploits the “opportunity to reshape society in order to secure its hold on power and capital.” The author delves into realms of racial bias (who’s a “thief” when looting, who’s just a “survivor”), panic response, the “Samaritan’s dilemma,” and “creative destruction.” He concludes that post-disaster risk reduction must be realistic, that reconstruction must be inclusive, and that neutral parties must ensure the appropriate use of relief funds: obvious, yes; practiced, rarely.
A hackle-raising book about nature and human nature, venality and justice, and how disasters—before, during, and after—sharply mirror society.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-137-27898-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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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