A refreshingly optimistic view of our kind.
A social scientist looks at the good and bad sides of human character, arguing that we are evolutionarily inclined “to make a particular kind of society—a good one full of love, friendship, cooperation, and learning.”
How should one behave in the wake of a tragic shipwreck? Writes Christakis (co-author: Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, 2009, etc.), director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, two 1864 incidents in the South Pacific offer “an almost perfect natural experiment.” One crew, led by a captain who “seemed mostly interested in his own survival,” splintered and finally resorted to cannibalism, while on the other ship, “the men stuck together and worked collaboratively from the very beginning,” with no humans eaten. The men on the successful crew even organized an adult education program of sorts, playing chess and teaching each other mathematics, languages, and the like. By the author’s fluent account, the fate of the Grafton speaks to the better angels of our nature, which in turn tends to the good. What he calls a “social suite” of positive features that incline us to love, altruism, selflessness, learning, collaboration, and other such desiderata has an evolutionary nature and may even carry an adaptive advantage, certainly as compared to the dysfunctional characteristics that so often emerge in times of stress. Christakis examines the positive traits of communal societies such as the Shakers (a group that has disappeared, of course, thanks to a curious view of human reproduction), which exhibit altruism, compassion, and, interestingly, “an acceptance of individual differences” that can manifest in many ways. On the nature/nurture front, Christakis notes that kindness and altruism, or alternately nastiness and avarice, “may depend heavily on how our social world is organized.” The shipwreck experiment would seem to speak to that, as does the roiling social division of today. As he explores human nature and its possibilities, the author touches on all sorts of fascinating anthropological matters, such as the evolution of monogamy and the relative friendliness of affluent vs. working-class people.
A refreshingly optimistic view of our kind.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-23003-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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