A welcome survey of a big-picture problem: Rajan proposes a rebalancing to be brought about by decentralized politics,...
Capitalism builds private fortunes—often at the expense of the polity.
Communities—tribes, neighborhoods, and kindred social structures—are the basis of human commerce and the marketplace. Yet, writes Rajan (I Do What I Do, 2017, etc.), former chief economist and director of research at the International Monetary Fund, markets and the state alike have assumed many of the roles of traditional communities. By way of example, he writes that whereas in years past, we might have taken an auto-less neighbor to the grocery store, “today, she orders her groceries online.” The insistence on credentialing is one cause, with licensed professionals dominating many services that were once done within communities. While there are reasons of liability and public health at play, Rajan notes that the one-off transactions of today do not have the same network-building value as the repetitive, within-community transactions of old; “only individual interests matter, and they have to be met transaction by transaction.” This zero-sum economic scenario is especially prevalent in poor communities, but it is not inevitable—though it has a long historical basis in the replacement by modern structures of capitalism for the “reciprocal feudal obligation” of the pre-capitalist era. Strong communities, argues the author, can promote democracy and contain crony capitalism and corruption, just as healthy markets can contain the authoritarian impulses of the state. In that regard, democracy, capitalism, and community need not be mutually exclusive propositions even if the modern American emphasis on the market has produced profound inequalities that might have been tempered “by sensible government regulation.” Inequality yields radical populism, which yields authoritarianism, all, again, working against community. Rajan is sometimes repetitive, but his emphases seem well-placed, especially because we can see so much of his argument playing out in daily life, with private interests ascendant and the public good untended.
A welcome survey of a big-picture problem: Rajan proposes a rebalancing to be brought about by decentralized politics, diverse immigration, and other measures that, though controversial, certainly merit discussion.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55831-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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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