Idealistic and stronger in description than prescription, but a provocative essay nonetheless.
Reich (Public Policy/Univ. of California; Saving Capitalism, 2015, etc.) takes a note from Adam Smith and runs with it in this spirited defense of the public sphere.
The best economy may be one in which unrestrained trade occurs in keeping with the laws of supply and demand, but it is also one in which human needs are met and externalities such as environmental costs are taken into account. In this new gilded age, writes the author, the common good is often ignored, even if a few interesting things are happening. For one thing, Donald Trump “has at least brought us back to first principles….Trump has got us talking about democracy versus tyranny.” The president and his ilk have also gotten us talking about whether there is such a thing as a social contract or a public domain after all. In this brief but well-argued treatise, Reich contrasts shareholder and stakeholder capitalism, the excesses of the former often explained away by the notion that the executive has a fiduciary obligation to increase returns to shareholders no matter what the cost. “The argument is tautological,” writes the author. “It assumes that investors are the only people worthy of consideration. What about the common good?” The enemies of the common good are countless, from latter-day slumlords to deregulated megabanks and untrammeled hedge funds, all of which disregard the rules society has evolved to keep transactions fair, “tacit rules that can be exploited by people who view them as opportunities for selfish gain rather than as social constraints.” Reich examines the rise of ruleless society as a function of declining trust in social institutions. Against all this, among other things—and now borrowing a page from Sandra Day O’Connor—the author urges a renewal of civic education to enable people “to work with others to separate facts and logic from values and beliefs,” including, one assumes, the belief that it is acceptable to rob the public blind.
Idealistic and stronger in description than prescription, but a provocative essay nonetheless.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52049-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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