In this accessible text, a noted economist makes a case for a healthier global economy and shared rules and principles to support it.
A globalized economy requires free trade agreements and an absence of barriers and tariffs. Yet, as Rodrik (International Political Economy/John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Univ.; Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science, 2015, etc.) notes, many nations that have benefited from those trade agreements haven’t quite played by the rules, such as the towering economy of China and the smaller one of Vietnam, while countries that do abide by the rules and rely on free trade, such as Mexico, have suffered. Given that globalism has provided a powerful bogeyman for Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen (who promised to dissolve the European monetary union if elected president of France), among others, an irony is hidden in all this. While “the global dissemination of democratic norms from the advanced countries of the West to the rest of the world has been perhaps the most significant benefit of globalization,” it is precisely in those advanced countries that democracy seems most endangered. Rodrik ventures that the idea of a “free market” is itself problematic, inasmuch as in the U.S. there has historically been a great deal of government infrastructural and financial support for private initiatives, with companies such as Apple and Intel benefiting from federal largesse in their early years. The author makes a point of distinguishing free trade and fair trade as two different things, with fair trade combatting protectionism while also restraining globalizers “from gaining the upper hand in cases in which international trade and finance are a backdoor for eroding widely accepted standards at home”—a living wage, say. Though Rodrik allows that some trade agreements can stand structural revision, he suggests that the developing world will not be a sufficient source of innovation to lead the global economy in the future.
A thoughtful, reasoned argument, of much interest to students of globalism and its discontents.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-691-17784-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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“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. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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