Just the thing to give your black helicopter–fearing uncle—or maybe not. An interesting exercise in geopolitical wonkiness.
A manifesto for multilateralism, one-worldism, social justice and all the other things that haunt tea party nightmares.
The nation-state, writes Singaporean scholar/diplomat Mahbubani (Beyond the Age of Innocence, 2005), is an artifact of the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. Most of us may think of it as the natural order, but he argues, “it is hard to believe that a human construct invented more than three hundred fifty years ago can serve humanity when everything has changed so totally.” Indeed: Think of what has changed in just the last couple of decades, with China poised to become the world’s largest economy within this decade and the United States turned from the world’s sole superpower to a declining polity crumbling from economic weakness and imperial overreach. For all the “clash of civilizations” that defines the modern era, Mahbubani urges, things aren’t necessarily all that bad out there; Saudi Arabia may repress women, but it’s also built “the world’s newest and largest scientific university.” China has risen as a power in part because of American generosity but also because America “was so supremely self-confident that it would always remain number one.” The trick now, writes the author, is to shed ideas of supremacy. There are some obvious platitudes attendant in such a rosy view, among them this: “The whole world would be better off if the 7 billion citizens of planet earth became more and more aware of the global impact of their activities.” Well, yes, but for all the fuzziness, Mahbubani offers practical steps, including a recomposition of the U.N. Security Council to encourage one-worldism.
Just the thing to give your black helicopter–fearing uncle—or maybe not. An interesting exercise in geopolitical wonkiness.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61039-033-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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