An informative and thought-provoking framework for reckoning with total costs.
Bainbridge presents an argument for a new approach to accounting and sustainability in this nonfiction work.
The author argues that fighting climate change requires acknowledging the true cost of products, practices, and decisions beyond their literal dollar value and ensuring that this full cost is borne by those responsible for it. The book advocates a revamped system of accounting that includes external costs, assigns a monetary value to indirect costs, and factors in the full value of natural resources and intangible inputs. While the focus is primarily on environmental implications, Bainbridge’s system also incorporates working conditions, health care, and community impact. After a comprehensive overview, subsequent chapters explain how the system applies to specific industries like agriculture, construction, and energy. The book provides examples of cases in which governments have successfully imposed financial penalties for destructive actions, such as fees charged for pesticide and fertilizer use in Scandinavia. It also details the elements of a true cost report, used to assess and convey the all-inclusive cost of an activity (the author provides guidance on how to create one). Bainbridge is an extremely knowledgeable author, and although the text can appear dense, he is skilled at crafting coherent explanations of complex topics and turning piles of data into a narrative. The book does an excellent job of providing specific examples of true costs, including a multipage enumeration of the differences between a conventional fast-food restaurant burger and a bison burger that demonstrates how their costs go beyond the price listed on the menu. There are occasional moments of clever phrasing (“A few years from now, when people ask what happened to Arizona’s water, the answer will be, ‘the Saudi cows ate it’ ”), but overall the prose is simple, clear, and unaffected. Although the book deals primarily with large structural issues—Bainbridge does not pretend that it will be easy to adopt a new system of accounting—it also offers actionable tips for readers looking to reduce their own true costs on a small, manageable scale.
An informative and thought-provoking framework for reckoning with total costs.Pub Date: June 14, 2023
ISBN: 9798987261927
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Rio Redondo Press
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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