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
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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