The world of data as illuminated here would have scared George Orwell.
The former Secretary of Homeland Security surveys the brave new world of data collection and analysis and finds that both the legal system and international relations have yet to keep pace with technology.
Chertoff (Homeland Security: Assessing the First Five Years, 2009), who has also served as a judge and a prosecutor, contrasts the present day with earlier eras when there was more of a strong distinction between public and private. An invasion of privacy once meant encroaching on one’s property, but technology has dissolved any expectation of privacy or even a sense of who is doing the encroaching and what is being encroached upon. We share our information freely despite the consequences, we depend on smartphones that track us everywhere and lack adequate safeguards, and we invite devices into our homes to monitor our preferences and activities. In an era of facial-recognition software, laws reflect the days when surveillance was by camera (before every phone had one) or phone tapping (on landlines). “When technology has dramatically expanded the ability to monitor activities in a previously unrecognizable way, we need a new set of laws,” writes the author, whose current company offers security consulting. He continues, “Inevitably, this will require tradeoffs between different values: privacy, autonomy, security, and the individual versus the collective interest.” Chertoff shows how such an initiative is necessary as well as extremely challenging, as the internet transcends borders of nations that have very different attitudes toward individual rights and as the process involves different stages of collecting and analyzing data, by governments and commercial concerns alike. Though the writing rarely rises above workmanlike, the author’s experience in these areas runs deep, and he shows reasons for concern in areas many readers might not have considered. “We frequently trade away our data for a short-term convenience or lower-cost gratification without realizing the long-term consequences,” he warns—until our insurance companies start monitoring our grocery purchases and restaurant preferences to determine how healthy our diets are.
The world of data as illuminated here would have scared George Orwell.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2793-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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