Recommended for policy wonks that accept the author’s belief in the inevitable expansion of government social spending.
Can America adopt a Scandinavian-style social safety net?
Kenworthy (Political Science and Sociology/Univ. of Arizona; Progress for the Poor, 2013, etc.) believes that the cure for America's ills is more social democracy, which he defines as "a commitment to extensive use of government policy to promote economic security, expand opportunity, and ensure rising living standards for all." To this end, the author sets out a list of a dozen or so policies he considers desirable, including wage insurance, universal health care and government as employer of last resort, which he would pay for with greatly increased taxation, including a value added tax. Kenworthy’s purpose is not to argue for the desirability of social democratic policies. He assumes that the trajectory of American government is inevitably and appropriately toward more social services and disposes of objections that big government may result in corruption, incompetence or excessive restrictions on liberty. The author focuses almost exclusively on economic considerations. Using a plethora of graphs and charts, he demonstrates that other countries, particularly in Scandinavia, have managed to balance high levels of government taxation and services with healthy economies, and he argues that America could do the same. His intent is to help "shape the timing, scope and nature of future policy” by analyzing which approaches are most likely to work based on multinational economic statistics. The heart of the book is a thoughtful, detailed exploration of such issues as whether a higher minimum wage is preferable to increased earned income tax credits and the relative efficacy of various services and income transfer programs. Even so, some of Kenworthy’s observations are questionable; for example, he contends that the U.S. economy could support higher levels of government taxing and spending without considering that we borrow much of the cost for current levels of social services.
Recommended for policy wonks that accept the author’s belief in the inevitable expansion of government social spending.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-19-932251-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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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