Insightful—if sometimes debatable—portraits of countries on the cutting edge of social progress.
A fellow of the Institute of Public Administration Australia explores why 10 countries excel in certain areas, such as fostering innovation, promoting longevity, or achieving energy independence.
Intentionally or not, Wear updates for our age of hyperglobalization the approach used in the business classic In Search of Excellence. Each country gets a chapter that ends with tips on achieving its results, and most entries hit the mark. Iceland has “the world’s smallest gender gap,” owing partly to strong anti-discrimination policies, one of which says that women must hold at least 40% of the board seats at companies over a certain size. Wind turbine–rich Denmark is blazing renewable-energy trails—on windy days, Denmark “regularly generates more than 100 per cent of its electricity requirements from wind”—and South Korea’s universal health care helps explain why its average citizen has a life expectancy at birth that “exceeds that of every single English-speaking country.” With homegrown tech giants like Apple and Google, the U.S. is the innovator in chief, aided by collaborative ties among governments, businesses, and universities in places like Silicon Valley and “innovation districts” in Phoenix and other cities. Wear less plausibly praises Indonesia’s “successful transition from dictatorship to democracy,” even as “dark clouds” are gathering. When it comes to enlightened immigration policies, the author gives the nod to Australia—although it treats some new arrivals in “rather draconian” ways—instead of Canada, often called the world’s best country for immigrants, including in a 2019 U.S. News & World Report survey (Australia is listed fourth). A few iffy choices aside, Wear conversationally imparts a wealth of carefully analyzed facts that amount to far more than a glorified BuzzFeed list. He has much to say not just to policymakers, but to business and other travelers to countries he profiles.
Insightful—if sometimes debatable—portraits of countries on the cutting edge of social progress.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78607-901-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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