A look at the impact of globalization on young people finds intriguing differences in family relationships and living patterns in selected countries around the around.
A sociologist who has written widely on poverty and the working poor (The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America, 2007, etc.), Newman (dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University) interviewed some 300 families in the United States, Italy, Spain, Japan, Denmark and Sweden to assess this impact. She found that global competition has had a profound effect on young adults in the West and in Japan who find themselves facing extended unemployment, forcing many to live at home with their parents. The resulting formation of multigenerational households, or "accordion families," is a phenomenon that intrigues Newman, and her interviews reveal significant differences in how it is regarded in different societies. In addition to the personal stories, the author provides charts and tables that starkly illustrate the changes. In Japan, parents with adult children in the household tend to blame themselves for their grown offspring's failure to launch, whereas Spanish parents tend to blame the government for abandoning the young generation to economic forces. Italian parents take a much more positive view, welcoming the presence of live-in adult children. In the United States, parents seem willing to house and support adult children if they are working for advanced degrees or at unpaid internships that will further a professional career. The most striking difference, however, is in the Scandinavian countries, where strong welfare systems support the independence of young people with subsidized housing, free education and unemployment insurance. A consequence of delayed adulthood is that the young are not marrying and producing the next generation, a problem especially severe in Japan. Newman sees three possible solutions: increasing immigration, increasing taxes to maintain a safety net for an aging population or cutting back on the safety net. Clear presentation of a growing problem, its causes and consequences and the choices societies make.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0743-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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