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
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
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