A timely and relevant analysis of the post-Communist world that seeks to explain the fall of Communism and, perhaps without intending to do so, drops an intellectual bomb into the budget debate in the US. Lord Skidelsky (Political Economy/Warwick Univ.; John Maynard Keynes, Vol. II, 1993, etc.) adapts his book's title from that of Friedrich Hayek, who predicted that collectivism would lead to serfdom. Skidelsky agrees, calling collectivism ``the belief that the state knows better than the market, and can improve on the spontaneous tendencies of civil society . . . the most egregious error of the twentieth century.'' That collectivism has affected states everywhere—including the West, where it takes the form of increased government spending. In 1960, the governments of the main industrial countries spent, on average, 30 percent of their GNP; by 1985 this was 47 percent. The result, as Hayek predicted, was inflation, growing unemployment, and a sharp reduction in growth rates. Skidelsky traces the growth of this collectivist urge (and, in an interesting aside, notes that regulation is ``a potent source of collectivist creep. . . . It is perhaps the characteristic form of collectivism in the United States''). He rejects the association of Keynesian policy with inflation and socialism, linking Keynes rather with Hayek, Beveridge, Popper, and Schumpeter as liberal thinkers who helped to destroy intellectual support for collectivism. None of them would have succeeded, however, without the actions of Reagan and Thatcher, and the characteristically Anglo-American individualist reaction against the failures and excesses of government. Most provocative is Skidelsky's conclusion that public spending should not exceed 30 percent of national income and that deep cuts cannot be made without reducing the social agenda of the state: ``The collectivist age will not be over until state spending has been drastically pruned.'' One of the most incisive and potentially influential analyses of the implications of the fall of Communism.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-713-99122-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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