A sort of All the President’s Men for our time, and just the thing to lure bright young people into economics graduate...
The story of the century—the 21st, that is—is the ongoing financial crisis that has threatened to bring the developed world to its knees. Why business writers didn’t see it coming is the big question this collection of essays seeks to answer.
The collapse that led to the Great Recession came, writes Schiffrin (School of International and Public Affairs/Columbia Univ.), at a perfect-storm time for journalism, when collapsing advertising revenues and “the ensuing layoffs and staff cuts . . . made journalists fear for their jobs and perhaps more afraid to stand out from the rest of the pack.” And that was for the journalists who still had jobs, since some 30,000 nationwide had been eliminated, along with entire newspapers and magazines. Despite the generalized sense of guilt and shame about the failure to warn readers about the catastrophe, there was largely nothing to be done about it, since the business media had also become “embedded” inside Wall Street in the same way that war correspondents are embedded inside combat units. In these positions, the journalists were loath to report the unpleasant truths—if they were capable of doing so at all, given that few business reporters have the requisite understanding of economics to give a big-picture view of events by taking inches-thick reports home and reading between the lines to discern such startling revelations as, according to Washington Post writer Dan Froomkin, “the middle class may never be the same again” and “the hugely irresponsible financial sector remains unchastened.” Some contributors note external reasons for the failure of the business press, not least the obfuscations and outright lies of Wall Street. In all events, as New York Times writer Peter Goodman writes, it was hard to do deep interpretation and forecasting when “we had our hands full simply trying to make sense of the crush of events unfolding day after day.” Other contributors include Joseph Stiglitz and Barry Sussman.
A sort of All the President’s Men for our time, and just the thing to lure bright young people into economics graduate programs and journalism school—if only there were jobs waiting on the other end.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59558-549-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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