A convincing attack on today’s dysfunctional economy plus admirable suggestions for correcting matters.
A sweeping historical examination of the promises and limitations of technological advances in relation to important economic and social issues.
Complaints about the miseries of progress began well before the Industrial Revolution but mostly addressed miserable working conditions until well into the 20th century. Perhaps beginning with John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958), activists have broadened their targets to include government and social institutions. In this insightful analysis, MIT economics professors Acemoglu and Johnson begin with a painful fact. Since 1980, Americans without a college education have seen their earnings decline, while graduates with no postgraduate degree have gained a little. Hypereducated professionals, scientists, engineers, and financiers are prospering in what is becoming a highly stratified society. Rewinding the clock, the authors emphasize that wealth produced by the Industrial Revolution mostly benefited entrepreneurs, skilled technicians, and those who already possessed wealth. Workers in the new factories were worse off than in the countryside, and cities were crowded, squalid, and disease-ridden. Matters changed when the general public began to exert influence. The rise of democracy encouraged the growth of countervailing power structures, including unions. Once legislators owed their jobs to a mass electorate, they began looking after their interests, outlawing profitable but cruel practices and creating safety nets such as unemployment insurance and national health care. Worker income rose through most of the last century, until it stalled around 1980. This was not inevitable but rather the result of choices made by the drivers of technological progress and propelled by worship of the free market. Since then, opposition to cutting labor costs has almost vanished, producing automated services that eliminate jobs without benefiting customers. Toward the end, the authors offer a range of reasonable remedies, including a move to “significantly reduce or even fully eliminate payroll taxes.” Governments should redirect digital research away from their obsession with big data and surveillance toward green technology and machine usefulness rather than artificial intelligence.
A convincing attack on today’s dysfunctional economy plus admirable suggestions for correcting matters.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781541702530
Page Count: 560
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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