An informed and measured exploration of the myriad harms billionaires impose.
How the ultrawealthy are ruining our economy, society, and planet, and what we might be able to do about it.
Collins, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, specifically calls out billionaires in the title of his latest book, but his focus encompasses “households that are in the top one-tenth of 1 percent,” those with more than $40 million in assets, the approximate point at which “wealth translates into levels of influence and power that distort democracy.” Collins argues that, regardless of how generous or admired individuals within this class may be, the collective actions and existence of billionaires contribute to the worsening of almost every aspect of life. For the past several decades, workers have shared increasingly less in the productivity gains of their ever-wealthier employers, one of several mechanisms allowing fewer people to amass the majority of society’s wealth. Taxation reform, especially President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, have shrunk what the wealthy pay, particularly the once-robust estate tax. These and other public policies “have enriched asset owners at the expense of wage earners,” enabling family dynasties and individuals to amass eye-boggling fortunes far beyond what’s possible by mere salary alone. The enduring myth of meritocracy furthers the misperception that billionaires deserve their riches—and that the poor deserve their misfortune. Ultrawealthy donors funnel huge amounts of money into super PACs for favored candidates and then lean on elected officials to pass policies favorable to billionaires. The world’s richest people, through their polluting companies and super-yachts, also contribute an outsize amount to worsening climate change; Collins writes that “the emissions of the top 1 percent will cause 1.3 million excess deaths due to heat between 2020 and 2030.” Numerous charts and comic illustrations pepper the text. Collins offers many straightforward, if not simple, solutions for reversing the “billionaire burn” at both personal and governmental levels. However, political developments in the United States may be pushing even the most sensible reforms further out of reach.
An informed and measured exploration of the myriad harms billionaires impose.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781620979099
Page Count: 240
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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