A nicely optimistic look at a matter that usually brings out the darkest thoughts among prognosticators—if a touch...
Forget Club of Rome gloom and doom. If the future isn’t necessarily bright enough for shades, then, write high-tech pioneer Diamandis and science journalist Kotler (A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life, 2010, etc.), things are going to work out just fine.
The title speaks volumes. A tenet of capitalism is that resources are scarce, which justifies our scramble to get what we can. Yet, write the authors, “when seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce, they’re mainly inaccessible.” So drinking water is scarce and getting scarcer? There’s a big ocean out there; what remains to be done is to develop some method to desalinate the ocean’s water “in the same way that electrolysis easily transformed bauxite into aluminum.” Of course, there is also a major shortage of fossil fuels—but no shortage of sunlight, and in fact more than 5,000 times as much solar power available as we could possibly use in our wildest dreams. It will bring some readers up short to contemplate the abundance that Diamandis and Kotler project in the face of the stark reality that there may well be 10 billion humans on the planet by the year 2050, but that doesn’t daunt the authors much, given the human talent for engineering our way out of trouble. Engineering is a major part of their program, as “the purview of backyard tinkerers has extended far beyond custom cars and homebrew computers, and now reaches into once esoteric fields like genetics and robotics.” What about the health-care crisis? Well, nothing a few generations of robotic surgeons can’t help, if not cure. Food crisis? Just 150 vertical-farm skyscrapers could feed all of New York City. And so on, to the point that there seems to be no problem that the authors find insurmountable, or even especially daunting.
A nicely optimistic look at a matter that usually brings out the darkest thoughts among prognosticators—if a touch starry-eyed, at least a dream worth nurturing.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1421-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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