Siegel’s snotty, Luddite attitude doesn’t make much of a case for “being human.”
News flash! The Internet has changed our lives!
Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past 15 years is well aware that computers and the Internet have radically altered the world in many ways, some positive (e.g., quick access to random information, a convenient place to store Word documents) and some negative (e.g., less meaningful human contact). Which means that a 200-page diatribe pining for pre-Pentium days seems more than a little archaic. In his recent books, Siegel (Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television, 2007, etc.) has demonstrated a predilection for intellectualizing topics that don’t necessarily merit intellectualization (Joey and Iron Chef America, for instance). Here he waxes philosophic on the Electronic Age, but he’s behind the times. For instance, the YouTube, MySpace and Match.com backstories and/or functionalities are familiar to anybody with even the slightest interest in Internet culture. Siegel uses the words and thoughts of such contempo-philosophers as Malcolm Gladwell and Alvin Toffler to support or disprove his arguments, which further underscores the fact that this material has been covered better elsewhere. Of Wikipedia, Siegel writes, “Why does Wikipedia exist? If you ask its promoters the question, they’ll look at you as though you were wearing a loincloth and carrying a club…They’ll throw up their hands. ‘It’s convenient!’ they’ll say. Duh!”
Siegel’s snotty, Luddite attitude doesn’t make much of a case for “being human.”Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52265-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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