An inspiring, provocative encouragement to younger generations to exercise political clout.
A spirited critique of American politicians’ treatment of younger generations, and a plan of action for youth empowerment.
According to Moon (The Beltway Beast, 2014), a 65-year-old former financial industry executive and father of three, his generation’s stewardship of American democracy has been a moral disgrace. Its greatest victim, he says, is the “MI generation,” which includes millennials and the “iGeneration,” defined as “those born after 1998.” The current crop of American political leaders, he says, has given MIs a dangerous environmental policy, a widening chasm of economic inequality, and a toxic culture of rigid partisanship. The author particularly focuses on the damage caused by student-loan debt and an incoherent health care system. In both cases, he asserts, industries are permitted to engender unchecked hyperinflation. The United States government makes billions in profit annually from student loans, he says, which threatens to financially cripple an entire younger generation. And the health care system, he writes, seems designed to deliver the most onerous costs and the most limited choice. He does offer good news, though, noting that the MI generation is loaded with talent and diversity, that it has a penchant for entrepreneurial and technological innovation, and that it will soon become a dominant voting bloc. Moon recommends a political-action plan that focuses on winning vulnerable congressional seats and offers a set of criteria for selecting suitable candidates. Despite admitting his “guilt, frustration, and anger” at the current state of things at the outset of this book, the author supplies a surprisingly sober analysis—one that’s consistently reasonable and pragmatic. He also avoids obvious partisan allegiances, dispensing plenty of criticism for both major parties and decrying an electoral system that makes it extraordinarily hard for a candidate outside the two-party system to prosper. That said, this is a very brief study that covers an expansive stretch of political terrain, and as a result, some of the arguments, particularly in the sections on health care and student debt, are more exacting than others; a section on foreign policy is sensible but covers familiar ground. Overall, though, this is an intelligent call for practical reform.
An inspiring, provocative encouragement to younger generations to exercise political clout.Pub Date: June 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9913721-5-7
Page Count: 152
Publisher: MGN Books
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
SEEN & HEARD
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