by David Dante Troutt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2014
A forcefully presented eye-opener sure to provoke controversy as well as interest.
Troutt (Law and Justice/Rutgers School of Law, Newark; The Importance of Being Dangerous, 2009, etc.) offers a controversial counter to the claim that social spending is an out-of-control government expense.
The author writes that “localism,” the autonomous local control of suburban communities, has increased costs of education and policing far beyond affordable levels and reinforced the economics of institutional racism. Troutt asks two important questions: “[W]ho really gets the most government subsidies?” and “[W]hy should I live near poor people?” He develops a convincing case that government subsidies are not just handouts to the poor, but in fact have subsidized middle-class lifestyles as well. Since the 1930s, these have been carried out through specially designed loan packages, tax deductions for mortgages and local property taxes, and the construction of the federal highway system. These subsidies have been under attack since the recent financial crisis. Troutt debunks as mere ideology the contention that suburban neighborhoods, considered to exemplify the American dream, have flourished only due to homeowner and community self-sufficiency and autonomy. He shows how, since the 1970s, Supreme Court decisions favoring local autonomy in zoning, land use and education have undermined the gains made by 1960s civil rights reforms. “By 1980,” he writes, “localism had trumped the equality principle to reproduce formal segregation but in a non-racial way. For all its benefits, localism has a fatal flaw, narrow parochialism…its most destructive aspect.” The author believes that subsidized suburban communities and poor, inner-city areas both need common interest solutions like those advocated 50 years ago by Martin Luther King Jr.; they should be based on interdependence instead of separation in economic and political relations. “Ultimately, this book is a rejection of our divisive assumptions, an argument about the profound interdependency of our lives,” writes the author.
A forcefully presented eye-opener sure to provoke controversy as well as interest.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8147-6055-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
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
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