A persuasive work of advocacy journalism that warrants attention—and phone calls to one’s congresspeople.
A full-bore denunciation of the American way of working for The Man for free.
If we live in an attention economy, as some say, then a big chunk of our attention is hijacked by the federal government in the form of what Atlantic economics writer Lowrey calls a “time tax.” Any exercise of rights and responsibilities involves a mountain of paperwork, sent to understaffed agencies with two-hour call wait times. “We work as our own health-care administrators,” she writes. “Our own tax professionals. Our own social workers. Our own legal advocates, long-term-care policy brokers, and permit expediters.” We are, in short, our own bureaucrats in a lumbering bureaucracy—Lowrey brightly calls it “kudzu”—that is badly in need of modernizing and overhauling so that, as she notes, civil servants can “work in operational agencies, not procedural ones.” A needy person applying for social services, such as SNAP (food stamp) benefits, must invest scores of hours filling out forms dozens of pages long and gathering supporting evidence; even filling out a short federal income tax form takes an average of eight hours—time that is, of course, unpaid. By Lowrey’s account, this is by design: “Poverty is a social construct, not just a material state of being, and the time tax is part of its construction”—an instrument of punishment for the sin of being poor. These “deliberate tools of social control” are punitive and undemocratic—and things don’t have to be this way, as effective agencies (the Postal Service, to name one of her examples) prove. Lowrey closes with a reasoned set of proposed reforms, including upgrading the civil service and “the elimination of paperwork traps and policy delays.” Her argument is repetitious in spots but all to the end of citizens reclaiming stolen time.
A persuasive work of advocacy journalism that warrants attention—and phone calls to one’s congresspeople.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9780063442559
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.
Tired of the lies about the 2020 election? Buckle up: Trump is just warming up, and his allies may be getting craftier.
“This is not a book about January 6, 2021. It is a book about January 6, 2025,” write legal scholars Lessig and Seligman. We are lucky, Lessig suggests, that John Eastman and his fellow plotters “picked the dumbest possible strategy for pursuing what we feared they were trying to accomplish”: namely, trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to certify the results by which Joe Biden won the presidency. One might argue that the second dumbest strategy was to send an army of fascist goons to the Capitol to try to enforce Eastman’s argument. However, Lessig and Seligman argue, there are holes in the Constitution wide enough to drive a burning dumpster through, and they might allow an interested party to falsely claim victory in a closely contested race and win the election. The authors presume that any such gaming-the-system effort will come from MAGA Republicans, though they add that a Democrat could easily use the same tactics. Readers may need a law degree to follow some of the arguments, but others are quite accessible. One argument that Lessig has been mounting for some time, for instance, is that the winner-take-all method employed by most states for electoral votes needs to be replaced with an apportionment system so that the Electoral College count will align with the popular vote. On that score, the authors warn, the prospect of rogue electors—or more, rogue governors who control those electors—is very real, and numerous other threats could enable someone smarter than the last bunch to mount “a cataclysmic attack on our democracy.”
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780300270792
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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