A conversation between two very smart people, well worth listening in on.
Noted political economist meets noted political philosopher in this discussion of inequality and its cures.
First, the good news from French political economist Piketty: Inequality is at lower levels than it was a century ago in most places. That, he hastens to add, “is less true in the US, but even in the US it is true as compared to 100 years ago.” In conversation with Sandel at the Paris School of Economics in May 2024, Piketty does most of the talking, though Sandel certainly holds his own. That conversation could not be more timely, for in it the two diagnose what led to the outcome of the 2024 presidential election: Obama’s bailout of the banks in the 2008 crash “dashed the high hopes for a revival of progressive or social democratic politics that his candidacy had inspired,” while formerly Democratic strongholds that went over to Donald Trump in 2016 did so as a measurable reaction to loss of jobs to China. The alienation of the working class remains firm. Says Piketty, “You cannot just blame the right-wing populists, blame their ‘deplorable’ voters, their deplorable leaders”: no, he holds, the Democrats abandoned their core in favor of urban elites, and the winning argument is about jobs, not identitarian politics. Sandel and Piketty kick around some interesting leveling mechanisms, including the thought that elite universities should admit top-level students into a pool from which, say, two thousand entries enter any given school by lottery, eliminating at least some built-in inequalities. Sandel goes on to note that while only some 38% of Americans have four-year college degrees, almost no one in Congress lacks one, meaning the working class is essentially unrepresented politically. They have a fix, and it’s both surprising, intriguing, and worth trying.
A conversation between two very smart people, well worth listening in on.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781509565504
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Polity
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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