A closely argued study of the merits and demerits of free market economics in action.
The history of the economic shock that accompanied the right-wing military coup in Chile in 1973.
In 1955, the U.S. State Department launched a project in which Chilean economists were trained in the free market fundamentalism of Milton Friedman. When Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government of Salvador Allende, “the first Marxist politician to be freely elected as a head of state in any country,” the “Chicago Boys,” as they were called, went to work undoing Allende’s socialist reforms and installing policies that included the privatization of social security, the use of school vouchers, and the abolition of thousands of regulations. As Edwards, a professor of economics and former chief economist for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank, writes, the economists “would soon find out how different pontificating from the ivory tower was from actually implementing policies aimed at changing decades of entrenched policies.” Still, Chile eventually found its footing as a bastion of neoliberalism, and in the early 2000s, “Chile became, by a wide margin, the wealthiest nation in Latin America.” The nation was also marked by predatory capitalism and shocking inequality, a situation that was just fine by Friedman but was anathema to the working people of Chile—and was “a serious weakness that was mostly ignored by the architects of the model and that would come to haunt them.” Additionally, given that neoliberalism is globalist, Chile was long hampered in international trade by its status as a pariah nation thanks to the very military dictatorship that had brought the Chicago Boys to the fore. For all its successes, neoliberal Chile came to suffer from the failure of privatized social security. With the election of the leftist activist Gabriel Boric to the presidency in 2021, Chile is now abandoning many Chicago tenets in order to “move away from markets and competition.” Throughout, Edwards maintains a detailed yet accessible narrative.
A closely argued study of the merits and demerits of free market economics in action.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9780691208626
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
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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