A fluent if dispiriting study of an economic system that forgives those at the top so long as those at the bottom remain...
A history of American financial crises, “boom-and-bust cycles of panics, failures, and the loss of individuals’ savings.”
Following the financial meltdown of 2008, writes former business journalist Day (Business Administration/Johns Hopkins Business School; S&L Hell: The People and the Politics Behind the $1 Trillion Savings and Loan Scandal, 1993), Queen Elizabeth II asked faculty at the London School of Economics why no one had noticed. It was, they said, “principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people.” As the author clearly shows, national and international economic systems involve many bright people, but the experts often fail—and, “given the political landscape, they will again.” Day ably documents a succession of crises that ought to have imparted essential lessons but that instead fueled further crises—e.g., tariffs or Andrew Jackson’s undoing of Alexander Hamilton’s national bank system, Jackson being the predecessor Donald Trump seems most to admire. Much of the author’s story concerns efforts to separate banking and investment, which Franklin Roosevelt characterized as “speculation with other people’s money”; every time the two are separated, of course, politicians join them together anew only to usher in another crisis. In several respects, Day shows, the 2008 crisis can be traced to 1929 and even farther back, with banks gambling and losing and government, after 1929, bailing them out as part of a “social contract…in which banks agreed to stricter oversight and tighter rules in exchange for a government safety net in times of crisis.” The collapse of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, the Enron debacle, Charlie Keating’s junk bonds, the Great Recession: All, by Day’s well-defended account, are of a piece, showing once again, as if proof were needed, that history teaches only that humans do not learn from history.
A fluent if dispiriting study of an economic system that forgives those at the top so long as those at the bottom remain willing to foot the bill.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-300-22332-3
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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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