Valuable for specialists and political journalists.
The enduring importance of geography in American politics.
Many argue that partisan gerrymandering causes cities to lose to rural areas in countywide, winner-take-all elections. That is too simple an explanation, writes Rodden (Political Science/Stanford Univ.; Hamilton’s Paradox: The Promise and Peril of Fiscal Federalism, 2005). Much more important is the geographical location of a political party’s base. In many states, urban areas are largely Democratic. The Democrats often win majorities there but fall short in pivotal districts outside the city that decide control of Congress and state legislatures. In this data-dense book, the author takes a deep look at the familiar urban-rural political divide, examines its implications for democracy (not good), and suggests ways to reduce polarization. He also shows how similar patterns affect elections in other Western democracies. In an intriguing section, he traces the roots of the American divide to the era of labor unrest before World War I, when left-leaning workers lived in urban working-class neighborhoods. In industrial Reading, Pennsylvania, they could win majorities in urban city council wards but found it harder to achieve victory in wards with more white-collar workers and business owners. Today, with the rise of the knowledge economy, this “pattern of political geography” continues even though city residents are now a far more heterogeneous collection of urban interest groups (working poor, immigrants, young progressives, etc.). Democrats cluster in “growing, affluent city centers like Seattle and San Francisco, as well as in smaller knowledge-economy hubs like Durham and Ann Arbor.” They fight “a perpetual battle for the party’s soul,” pitting firebrands against those trying to soften the party’s reputation to win rural votes. “A victory for the left is a victory not only for the urban poor…but also for universities, laboratory scientists, and social progressives,” writes the author. As Rodden argues, only electoral reform—a switch to representation in proportion to overall vote share—or major demographic shifts can reduce the underrepresentation of urban interests.
Valuable for specialists and political journalists.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5416-4427-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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