Bold proposals for a radical revision of contemporary society.
How the myth of achievement through merit alone has created a schism between the wealthy and the middle class.
Markovits (Law/Yale Univ.; Contract Law and Legal Methods, 2012, etc.), founding director of the Center for the Study of Private Law, responds to the much-debated issues of income inequality, middle-class discontent, and the rise of angry populism by mounting an impassioned and well-argued attack against meritocracy: the belief that talent and ambition lead to wealth and status. “The meritocratic ideal—that social and economic rewards should track achievement rather than breeding—anchors the self-image of the age,” writes the author. But that ideal, he counters, championed by progressives as a solution to inequality, is “a sham,” creating “aristocratic distinctions” that separate the rich from the increasingly frustrated middle class. Nor does meritocracy serve the rich, instead consigning elite workers to the “strained self-exploitation” of long hours at relentless, inhumane overwork that leads to an impoverished “inner life” and “destruction of the authentic self.” Markovits, who was educated and has taught at elite institutions, offers compelling evidence that despite gestures toward diversity, wealthy students make up the majority of admissions, producing “superordinate workers, who possess a powerful work ethic and exceptional skills.” These workers, who take “glossy” jobs, have displaced mid-skilled, middle-class workers, who are relegated to dismal, “gloomy” jobs that lead to income stagnation. Meritocracy, asserts the author, “debases an increasingly idled middle class, which it shuts off from income, power, and prestige.” He offers two far-reaching solutions: taking away private institutions’ tax-exempt status unless they expand opportunities for higher education to a broad public, making admission open and inclusive; and payroll tax reform and wage subsidies that would impel businesses, including the health care industry, to hire the “surging supply of educated workers” coming from newly accessible colleges. In medicine, for example, hiring nurses and nurse practitioners could make health care more accessible than hiring a few specialist doctors. Sure to be controversial, the author’s analysis and proposals deserve serious debate.
Bold proposals for a radical revision of contemporary society.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2199-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
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