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
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.
Another chapter in a long fight against inequality.
Building on his Fighting Oligarchy tour, which this year drew 280,000 people to rallies in red and blue states, Sanders amplifies his enduring campaign for economic fairness. The Vermont senator offers well-timed advice for combating corruption and issues a robust plea for national soul-searching. His argument rests on alarming data on the widening wealth gap’s impact on democracy. Bolstered by a 2010 Supreme Court decision that removed campaign finance limits, “100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion” on 2024 elections. Sanders focuses on the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, describing their enactment of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” with its $1 trillion in tax breaks for the richest Americans and big social safety net cuts, as the “largest transfer of wealth” in living memory. But as is his custom, he spreads the blame, dinging Democrats for courting wealthy donors while ignoring the “needs and suffering” of the working class. “Trump filled the political vacuum that the Democrats created,” he writes, a resonant diagnosis. Urging readers not to surrender to despair, Sanders offers numerous legislative proposals. These would empower labor unions, cut the workweek to 32 hours, regulate campaign spending, reduce gerrymandering, and automatically register 18-year-olds to vote. Grassroots supporters can help by running for local office, volunteering with a campaign, and asking educators how to help support public schools. Meanwhile, Sanders asks us “to question the fundamental moral values that underlie” a system that enables “the top 1 percent” to “own more wealth than the bottom 93 percent.” Though his prose sometimes reads like a transcribed speech with built-in applause lines, Sanders’ ideas are specific, clear, and commonsensical. And because it echoes previous statements, his call for collective introspection lands as genuine.
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798217089161
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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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