Attorney Howard makes an obvious but important point by decrying a system of governmental regulations whose complexity and detail often cause more harm than good; but his solutions are vague and quixotic. Howard contends that our nation has substantially abandoned a legal system that requires judges, legislators, and administrators to exercise good judgment and common sense. Rather, in an effort to promote certainty, uniformity, and fairness, we have created a nightmarish system of regulations managed by ineffectual and often corrupt bureaucrats who can avoid responsibility for the destructive consequences of the system they design and enforce. Our laws and regulations have become a morass of excruciating minutiae. This regulatory quagmire, Howard asserts, has failed to obtain its goals, such as making job sites safer and reducing pollution. Instead, the system has exacerbated the very problems it was designed to solve. The book's strength lies in describing and illustrating through examples the myriad ills of the regulatory system. Howard supports his argument with a dollop of history, a handful of statistics (such as the cost to Amoco of complying with environmental regulations), and anecdote upon anecdote; he relates, for instance, how the New York City Building Code prevented Mother Teresa from converting an abandoned building into a homeless shelter. The book's weakness is that Howard assumes that ``common sense'' is a self-evident proposition and that those who will not embrace it are misguided at best, corrupt at worst. He does not tell us how a good legal system would choose the ``common sense'' solution. This leads to the book's much too brief concluding chapter, which offers hyperbolic and ambiguous solutions such as ``relying on ourselves'' and seeking ``sensible results [which] come out of discussion and negotiation....'' A useful introductory essay that falters in failing to provide a definition of the ``common sense'' Howard says is needed to reform our regulatory system.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42994-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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
SEEN & HEARD
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