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
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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