A readable and provocative book making the convincing claim that the best city is one in which people can move around easily.
How to fix our transportation nightmare? Former New York City traffic commissioner Schwarz ventures some ideas—and while many are oddly counterintuitive, they just might work.
One projected infrastructure improvement in which “Gridlock Sam” took part would have rebuilt the Williamsburg Bridge into lower Manhattan, costing $700 million and adding a maintenance bill of $20 million per year precisely in order to add more cars to the traffic mix on the most crowded streets in America. “You could say the costs of the bridge outweighed the benefits, if there had actually been benefits,” writes Schwartz, who casts a jaundiced eye on much of the received wisdom, economic and social, around infrastructure improvement. The author instead offers a program that many cities use in part but none in whole. For example, he advocates congestion pricing, a New York innovation applied across the Atlantic in London, to the chagrin of Top Gear but the relief of traffic-trapped drivers. Schwartz’s economic lesson is unimpeachable: “when you give something valuable away for free, demand is essentially infinite. As a result, urban traffic congestion just keeps getting worse.” Other planks in the platform include multimodal transport systems that facilitate a smooth switch from rail to light rail to bus and the like. Overarchingly, though, a livable city, from a transportation standpoint, is one in which people walk and bike. Schwartz allows that cars are unlikely to disappear anytime soon, but he looks to Internet-smart millennials to create demand for a system in which an individual needs not a car but a smartphone. Traffic circles, streetcars, diagonal crossings: they’re all here. And so is Uber, even though Schwartz warns that such an unregulated ride-matching service will mean yet more gridlock: “the numbers won’t add up to more mobility, but less.”
A readable and provocative book making the convincing claim that the best city is one in which people can move around easily.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61039-564-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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