A self-proclaimed contrarian mixes praise with disappointment to prod his colleagues in a more progressive direction.
A Nobel laureate reports on U.S. economic policy and the state of Anglo-American economics.
A professor of economics emeritus at Princeton and author of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Deaton gathers essays he wrote for Britain’s Royal Economic Society over the last 25 years. One set of essays addresses substantive concerns, including health care policy, inflation and its measurement, global poverty, pensions, wealth and income inequality, and class and generational social disparities. The author casts doubt on the magic of the “free” market and claims that economic thinking is helpful but insufficient given the extent to which it is ignored by policymakers and/or used simply to justify politically determined decisions. The other essays address the economic discipline: professional organizations, journals, core disagreements, and the Nobel Prize. Deaton boldly asks why economists fail to deliver economic policy that reduces inequalities. “We have certainly made too little progress on central policy questions that ought to be amenable to scientific inquiry,” he writes. Internal disagreements, a failure of economists to recognize the political nature of advice-giving, the resistance of elected officials to issues of inequality, and the privileging of capital over labor in conventional economic wisdom stifle economic advice. Deaton bemoans American capitalism with its “government-enabled rent seeking and the destruction supported by the ideology of market fundamentalism.” However, he refuses to abandon mainstream economics, noting that we “need to put the power of competition back in the service of the middle and working classes.” To do so, the discipline must reconnect with its “proper basis, which is the study of human welfare.” Written for non-economists to help them understand “how my profession works,” the book is insufficiently attentive to the differences among and within the field’s academic, policy, and business realms.
A self-proclaimed contrarian mixes praise with disappointment to prod his colleagues in a more progressive direction.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9780691247625
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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