A competent, thorough assessment from a veteran expert in the field.
Edelman (Georgetown University Law Center; Searching for America's Heart: RFK and the Renewal of Hope, 2001, etc.) examines the continuing problem of poverty in the United States.
The author worked for Robert F. Kennedy on poverty issues and resigned from the Clinton administration because of disagreements over welfare reform. He contends that America has come to a turning point. “We are headed in the wrong direction,” he writes. “The hole we are in is getting deeper and deeper. The costs of not doing the right thing now for all of our children are going to get higher and higher.” Though a lot has been accomplished since the 1960s—e.g., food stamps, the earned-income tax credit and the indexing of Social Security to inflation—there is still plenty of work to be done. Children are one of the author’s major litmus tests. There are more children in poverty than ever, a fact that Edelman partly attributes to the low-wage economy, which has been adopted since the ’70s, as well as the resurgence of unprecedented income inequality. “An astonishing 20.5 million people lived in extreme poverty in 2010,” writes the author, “up by nearly 8 million in just ten years, and 6 million had no income other than food stamps.” Further, there is no state in the country where a worker on the federal minimum wage would be able to pay the rent for a single or two-bedroom apartment. Edelman depicts a growing impoverished population cycling between low-income work and dependence on extended family and friends. Without serious efforts to improve the quality of employment and address community and family issues, the situation will only get worse. Unfortunately, such improvement is questionable in the current political climate.
A competent, thorough assessment from a veteran expert in the field.Pub Date: May 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59558-785-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
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