A refreshingly unconventional and defensibly encouraging account of America’s economic and political future.
An optimistic prognosis of America’s financial future focuses on major global trends in monetary policy.
In this book, Katusa acknowledges that the United States is currently in the throes of an economic crisis, caught in a deflationary recession out of which it won’t soon extricate itself. But he refuses to join the now familiar chorus of “doom-and-gloom sentiment” regarding the future prospects of the country. The author convincingly predicts that the U.S. will continue to be a pioneer in technology, especially in the energy sector; that it will bolster its domestic manufacturing capabilities; and that it is uniquely prepared to accommodate the coming backlash against globalization, partially the consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic. But Katusa concentrates on the advantages the nation gains as a result of the dollar and grand shifts in monetary policy. Regarding the dollar, he argues that it will continue to serve as the default currency of the world, its hegemony unchallenged by ultimately weak rivals. In fact, America will dominate the international credit market so thoroughly that the principal geopolitical alliances will form around a shared dependency on U.S. dollars. At the heart of his book is a searching discussion of the American and global transition to modern monetary theory, in which the U.S. government continues to stimulate the economy through controlled inflation. Because of the digitization of currency, the “money supply can be increased indefinitely and in unlimited quantities without provoking the hyperinflation that has laid waste to most previous fiat currencies.” Katusa’s contentions are lucidly presented, an especially impressive feat given the technically prohibitive nature of the subject matter. He often strays far beyond his expertise—he makes sweeping predictions regarding foreign policy and energy storage, for example—but the core of his argument doesn’t depend on these digressions. In addition, he furnishes an edifying and accessible overview of monetary theory in general and the history of fiscal policy as it has been conducted by the U.S.
A refreshingly unconventional and defensibly encouraging account of America’s economic and political future.Pub Date: May 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-54-452144-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Katusa Research Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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