The author’s argument would benefit from more specific policy recommendations, but it still offers much for urban activists...
A searching look at how New York changed from a place of affordable (if tiny) walk-ups to a playground for the ultrawealthy.
A sadly characteristic moment in the transformation of New York into a byword for unaffordability was a moment of extreme excess: In 2011, a Russian billionaire paid $88 million for a 10-room apartment for his 22-year-old daughter who would only use it when she was visiting the city. That’s at a far remove from Busà’s experience, arriving from an already expensive Berlin to find affordable if somewhat timeworn digs in Greenwich Village—but then, when chased out by raising rates, to move from one spot after another in Brooklyn, which itself has priced most of the middle class out of the market. The result is that in 2014, “almost 60,000 people filed applications for 105 affordable units in Greenpoint,” and, the next year, “over 80,000 people found themselves applying for 38 newly built affordable units in Brooklyn.” New York is now a brand as much as a place, an evolution that, by Busà’s account, began in the aftermath of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and has been carried out through several mayoral administrations. The latest, he charges, led by the putatively left-populist Bill de Blasio, has been distressingly consistent with the policies of the Bloomberg and Giuliani years. Busà locates much of the change in the Bloomberg decade in power, when nearly half of New Yorkers paid more than 30 percent of their incomes, and one-fifth of them as much as 75 percent, for the privilege of living there. Despite de Blasio’s “mainstream curriculum,” Busà holds that meaningful reform is possible, that “the elite city is a policy choice, not some inevitable God-given mandate.”
The author’s argument would benefit from more specific policy recommendations, but it still offers much for urban activists and disaffected Gothamites to chew on.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-061009-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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