Brown’s portrait of an ideal market is speculative in the ordinary sense of the word, but, even if likely to be dismissed by...
In a Hobbesian marketplace full of predators and lambs, an economist offers a case for being a little nicer—and more mindful.
A primary tenet of Buddhism is that, given that all life involves suffering, we are at our best when minimizing another’s travails. In the economic sense, this involves a chain of Pareto improvements—transactions, that is, in which everyone is left better off than before. That’s the ideal, seldom realized. In Buddhist economics, one hopes for the same all-around benefit. To gauge how it works in a particular society, writes Brown (Director, Center for Work, Technology, and Society/Univ. of California), “we look at the distribution of well-being across its population, including equal access to opportunity.” Such an economy hinges on a recognition of the primacy of public goods, including ready access to education and other human-capital resources, and it requires a full reckoning of what an economist would call externalities: the costs of pollution attendant in burning a gallon of gas. In this calculus, the old laws of supply and demand yield to a new understanding, to “new prices and outputs that reflect our new interdependent values.” Naturally, such an understanding also involves a redistribution of wealth within Western economies and from richer to poorer countries, a kind of large-scale international socialism. Lest anyone dismiss Brown’s program as pure pie in the sky—though there is that—she offers the example of the Buddhist country of Bhutan, which “introduced the idea of using a Gross National Happiness (GNH) index in place of GDP to measure the nation’s prosperity and well-being.” And with lessened suffering and a few more dollars in the pocket, why wouldn’t one be measurably happier?
Brown’s portrait of an ideal market is speculative in the ordinary sense of the word, but, even if likely to be dismissed by the financier class, it makes for an attractive prospectus.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-366-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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
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