A provocative pulse-reading, the answer to whose title is probably yes—but at what cost?
Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post economics journalist Pearlstein examines our dominant economic system and finds it sorely wanting.
It is a foundational myth that anyone with a good idea and a strong will can make it in America, that one generation will do better than the next. If that were ever true, writes the author, then it is true no longer, not given the evolution of our peculiar form of capitalism with American characteristics, a spectacularly dog-eat-dog system. “The only thing exceptional about America,” he writes, “is that it is now less mobile than many other societies with long histories of rigid social and class structures.” Thomas Piketty has already told us as much, but not in prose so crisp and accessible. Pearlstein traces that evolution to the convergence of three related axioms 30-odd years ago: the notion that government is the problem and not the solution; that corporations have no responsibility other than increasing their shareholders’ wealth; and that morality doesn’t really enter into questions of the purse, “no matter how unequal the distribution of income and wealth might become.” These three ideas have yielded a scenario in which Republicans are now abandoning long-nurtured ideals of a balanced budget and investment in public goods in favor of a no-tax, laissez-faire economics in which the big ones eat the little ones. Pearlstein explodes supply-side assumptions, showing that present inequalities are yielding stagnation—why work when you can’t get ahead, as is the case for most workers today? Instead, he notes, studies have shown that the most productive economy balances egalitarian and meritocratic reward systems: Everyone shares to some extent, with incentives for those who do more. The author closes by proposing numerous systemic reforms, including profit-sharing, renewed antitrust legislation and enforcement, and limiting special-interest money in politics, all with an eye to "replenishing our stock of social capital.”
A provocative pulse-reading, the answer to whose title is probably yes—but at what cost?Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-18598-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
