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
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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