Eye-opening, timely and inspirational.
The Democratic senator from North Dakota exposes the greed, deception and self-interest that has contributed heavily to the current economic crisis.
In clear, piercing language, Dorgan (Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America, 2006) explains the mortgage crisis, showing how the profit motive led financial institutions to combine risky subprime mortgages with AAA securities, “akin to the days when meat-packing plants used sawdust as filler in sausage.” In order to increase their incomes, mortgage brokers were willing to promote subprime mortgages with hidden escalating payments to consumers with bad credit. Meanwhile, the Bush administration’s approach was to promote free markets and self-regulation. Soon large financial institutions with prestigious names were discovering toxic assets embedded with subprime loans that had gone bad. Dorgan also targets unregulated hedge funds. They are responsible for approximately 50 percent of the daily trading on the New York Stock Exchange, and have “behaved like sweaty gamblers at the craps table,” making huge bets on complicated financial instruments or “dark money,” potentially manipulating the market. The author is indignant at the fact that top hedge-fund managers make billions in annual income and yet pay only a 15 percent tax rate by redefining their income as “carried interest.” Why, he writes, should salaried workers be subjected to tax rates that are much higher while billionaires find tax loopholes? Dorgan makes no apologies for his liberal viewpoints, asserting that they indicate a sense of liberty and integrity that is crucial to the American dream. He believes that “capitalism in its purest form, completely unregulated, is like a race car with no brakes.” His anger at the private, no-bid Iraq war contracts awarded to companies like Halliburton is understandable, and he’s adamant about the necessity of oversight and regulation—specifically as it relates to the tax loopholes exploited by hedge-fund managers.
Eye-opening, timely and inspirational.Pub Date: May 26, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-38303-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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