A fresh, astute examination of current events and urgent challenges.
A cogent argument for why scientific and political debates must account for feelings of victimhood, fear, and betrayal.
Clashes between “cold objectivity” and “emotive falsehood,” between knowledge-based fact and visceral feeling, pervade contemporary discourse. Davies (Politics and International Relations/Goldsmiths, Univ. of London; The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, 2015, etc.) offers a penetrating analysis of 21st-century politics and culture in the U.S. and the U.K. Tracing the history of ideas beginning in the Enlightenment, the author transcends the familiar dichotomy of educated/uneducated, urban/rural, cosmopolitan/tribal that has come to explain combative political debate and elections that resulted in Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency. Davies sees a deepening crisis of trust in science, political representatives, and the professional media, whose practitioners are attacked as “elites” who favor the perspectives of “their own cultural and educational background.” Because the “civil and gentlemanly dimension of expert knowledge never includes everyone as a participant,” expertise has become associated with oppression and exploitation. Libertarians, among others, criticize scientific consensus—about climate change and vaccines, for example—as a “monopoly” and threat to free thought; instead, they promote the market as a valid discriminator between truth and lies: “Reality is all in the eye of the investor, creditor, or shopper.” Along with distrust of experts, Davies notes an erosion of the dichotomy between mind and body, rational thinking and emotive feeling, validated by discoveries in neuroscience and psychology. Feelings of pain, loss, and defeat have spurred the rise of populists, as well as conspiracy theorists, among those who feel disenfranchised and marginalized. Digital networks, rather than supporting “scientific ideals of factual consensus or objectivity,” instead delude users with the belief that the world “will become more obedient” to them. The author sees no prospect that defenders of science and rationality will regain widespread trust as “heroic scientific truth-seekers,” but they can contribute to fulfilling “simple, realistic, and life-changing promises” and creating “new institutions of social contracts and peace.”
A fresh, astute examination of current events and urgent challenges.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63538-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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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