An analytically rigorous and movingly impassioned introduction to a major national issue.
An astute study of the mounting student debt crisis in the United States, including its principal causes and possible remedies.
MacDonald, the author of Think Like a Dog(2019) and a corporate turnaround specialist, observes that the steady accumulation of student debt in America has become unsustainable. In 2018, the total amount surpassed $1.5 trillion with no signs of significant abatement. This staggering figure has caused extraordinary damage, both economically and socially. Homeownership has significantly diminished, and college graduates are putting off marriage and major purchases; they’re also seeking higher-paying jobs, which is a blow to the public-service sector. In this book, the author furnishes a meticulous and accessible account of the ballooning costs of college education, including the steep decline in government aid per student and the ever increasing budgets that are allocated to university administrators. MacDonald also ably sketches a synopsis of the history of tuition assistance from its beginnings as a function of private patronage to its transformation by the GI Bill following World War II. First-person accounts of struggles with college debt add a touching human element to his analysis by poignantly illustrating the real-world consequences of the crisis. One 18-year-old contributor tells of how the pinch of her financial aid predicament made her first week of college a “mental hell,” as her inability to pay for school made her feel “completely out of control.” MacDonald doesn’t limit his study to grim diagnoses of problems, though; he also expertly discusses the ways in which some colleges are conscientiously responding to the issue by, for example, offering no-loan financial aid packages. The author lucidly notes that the crisis is not merely a financial one, but also a societal one, in that it “limits an individual’s future choices” as well as the “availability of education as a path to a better life for many Americans.”
An analytically rigorous and movingly impassioned introduction to a major national issue.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-253-05143-1
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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