A fresh look at some of the mostly deeply held dogmas of economics, exploding many along the way.
A skillfully conducted tour of the role of price, once unmoored from reality, in adding chaos to an already chaotic world.
According to the efficient-market hypothesis, “the taken-for-granted orthodoxy of the economics profession,” the market will sort things out when it comes to setting prices, thanks to the ebb and flow of supply and demand, and prices themselves represent a gathering of bits of information “that create a spontaneous order all around us.” Yet, writes sociologist Russell, even as we live in a world governed by prices, this spontaneous order often dissolves into disorder. Part of the problem lies in the workings of modern “global finance capitalism,” in which prices are a function of the futures market—and those futures are now functions of derivatives, which dissolve the link between prices and real goods and instead trade in intangibles. The author begins with the example of bread, the price of which can be closely indexed to social chaos in places like 18th-century France—“in the eighty years before the Revolution, twenty-one were rocked by bread riots”—and the modern Middle East, with Egypt being both a leading importer of wheat and a polity unnaturally susceptible to spikes in bread prices and resulting social problems. Russell goes on to closely examine the dangers of speculation. Consider this curious case: Thanks to overly sensitive algorithms, with any news concerning the actress Anne Hathaway, the trading firm Berkshire Hathaway enjoys gains or suffers losses. Countries that are resource-rich are similarly blessed or cursed. “Oil-exporting countries are twice as likely to have outbreaks of civil war,” Russell writes, and when you peg the entire economy on the price of a barrel of oil, when prices fall, you get disasters such as Venezuela, “an allegedly socialist state that has its people living as pure market beings.”
A fresh look at some of the mostly deeply held dogmas of economics, exploding many along the way.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54585-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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