An intriguing report on unusual objectives pursued through outreach and debate.
Proceedings from the 2010 Mind & Life Institute conference, featuring dialogue with the Dalai Lama.
The Dalai Lama and two collaborators founded the Mind & Life Institute to create “collaboration between modern sciences, the world's living contemplative traditions, philosophy, humanities and social sciences.” The conference brought scientists, economists and philosophers together with the Dalai Lama to discuss how best Western science and humanities might work with Eastern philosophies like Buddhism to organize new secular ethics based on altruism and compassion. Participants included experimental social psychologist Donald Batson, editor Singer, the director of the Department of Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, and Lord Richard Layard, the founding director of the Center for Economic Performance, among others. The Dalai Lama, who participated in all of the sessions of the two-day conference, made clear his view “that the entirety of humanity needs altruism or empathy, not necessarily as part of their religious faith but to reduce certain problems we are facing today due to their absence.” The proceedings were organized into three sections: scientific and related research (Singer's work on current neuroscience and empathy, and psychiatrist Richard Davidson's research into compassion); Buddhist and economic perspectives on compassion (Layard's research into the economics of happiness); and examples of altruism in practical work (former Credit Suisse executive Arthur Vayloyan’s discussion of microfinance and how smart investments can generate social, environmental and financial profits at the same time). The Dalai Lama contributed his thoughts on the need for “more research…on how to introduce secular ethics into the modern educational system,” as well as on the research reported. He argues that science and secular ethics provide a more universal basis than even all major religions acting together could.
An intriguing report on unusual objectives pursued through outreach and debate.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06412-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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
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
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