A careful, well-informed examination of where the U.S. economy stands, how it got here, and where it needs to go.
An incisive study of how “the paradigm of globalization is now shifting.”
Globalization may have provided cheap consumer goods, notes Financial Times associate editor Foroohar, but there is an increasing awareness of the long-term costs. In her latest book, the author marshals an impressive range of knowledge to investigate the negative consequences of unquestioned globalization. The Covid-19 pandemic was a wake-up call to U.S. officials, revealing that the manufacture of even simple things such as cotton masks had been outsourced abroad, mainly to China. Fortunately, many American companies were able to structure their manufacturing processes to provide some of the needed goods. As Foroohar demonstrates, this revealed both the weaknesses and strengths of the U.S. economy. She accepts that globalization made many things cheaper for consumers, but she is realistic about the cost in the loss of jobs and resilience. At the same time, many companies have been cutting research-and-development spending and putting money into complex financial products—yet another example of short-sighted thinking. Much of the money and energy to support innovation has gone into the technology sector, and the result has been a “barbell economy” of big tech wealth and a “precariat” of low-paid service workers. However, Foroohar, who traveled the country as part of her research, sees an emerging generation of companies that have returned to making things in top-of-the-line factories that are making full use of 3-D printing and clever thinking. The author also sees a key role for government—not in splashing money around but in setting sensible trade rules and long-term objectives. Examining the industrial policies of other nations, Foroohar shares useful lessons. Ultimately, the pendulum has swung away from cut-price globalization toward more considered, localized perspectives. These are interesting, important views and ideas; hopefully, this book forms the basis of a new, cool-headed national discussion.
A careful, well-informed examination of where the U.S. economy stands, how it got here, and where it needs to go.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-24053-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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