If reading Piketty’s columns brings back bad memories of tough times of the recent past, it also helps make sense of recent...
“In the long run, patrimonial capitalism is the only kind that can exist.” The noted scholar of inequality (Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2014, etc.) looks at recent events through an economist’s lens.
These columns from Libération, the leftist newsmagazine founded by Jean-Paul Sartre, span the years 2008 to the near-present and focus largely on European matters, especially the crisis of the Eurozone in the last few years and its predecessor meltdown in the wake of the global financial downturn of 2007. This odd period, Piketty remarks, is characterized by a decline in income even as wealth increases markedly—a seeming contradiction but all of a piece with how fortunes are amassed and transferred. Even though “one certainly senses mounting public exasperation with the explosion of supersalaries for executives and traders over the past thirty years,” the author finds good economic reasons for the bailout of banks and bankers that followed the earlier crisis. His arguments often stray into moral realms, as when he decries the “obscene salaries” that accompany “senseless risk-taking behavior” on the parts of players within the financial system. Piketty also grumbles that getting decent worldwide governance of the financial system “will probably take many more crises.” Many of his pieces are comparatively easy to follow for readers without much knowledge of economics, especially when he picks apart topics that defy classical economic logic (“Do you understand anything about the carbon tax?” one piece from 2009 begins); in this he resembles Paul Krugman, who similarly writes clearly on complex topics. However, many of the other pieces require at least some knowledge of European affairs and of economics alike, as with his excursus on how Italian public debt is constructed.
If reading Piketty’s columns brings back bad memories of tough times of the recent past, it also helps make sense of recent financial history. Just be prepared for a mental workout.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-66332-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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