A thoughtful, largely clearheaded look at how “the late-twentieth century United States has ended up with an artificially polarized, rightward-tilting politics that downplays the needs and values of citizens in the missing middle [class].” Skocpol (Government and Sociology/Harvard; Health Care Reform and the Turn Against Government, not reviewed, etc.) examines how, during the past three decades or so, government social and tax policies have focused on the wealthy and the poor. Meanwhile, the lower-middle and middle-middle classes have suffered from wage stagnation, while benefiting only marginally or not at all from an expanding economy and the long “bull” stock market. Thus many “missing middle” couples and individuals work multiple jobs (often earning low pay in the growing service sector) to make ends meet, while the number lacking health insurance has grown by about a million per year during the Clinton presidency. Skocpol also demonstrates how at the same time the burden of poverty has shifted from the elderly to the young. The poverty rate among the former has dropped sharply, from over 33% in 1959 to 11% in 1996, while, according to one study, the US currently has the highest child poverty rate (21.5%) among 15 industrialized countries. Skocpol offers half a dozen proposals to ameliorate the “missing middle’s” plight; all “look for ways to build cross-generational and cross-class alliances” rather than appealing solely to working class or other left-liberal interests. Most, such as lending individuals money from the Social Security Trust Fund for educational and training programs—repayment would be through automatic payroll deductions’seem eminently sensible, if politically unfeasible. Some of Skocpol’s most far-reaching proposals, such as expanding Medicare to cover all Americans, are sketchy on fiscal details. But she convincingly indicts our often plutocratic, sound-bite-oriented political system for failing the middle class, and offers a strategy for effecting broad changes in social policy for the first time since the short-lived efforts to create a “Great Society” during the mid-1960s.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-393-04822-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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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