Stockman forcefully conveys enormous amounts of knowledge, but some assertions will be found to be contentious.
Former Michigan congressman and budget director for the Reagan administration Stockman (The Triumph of Politics: The Inside Story of the Reagan Revolution, 1986) tells “the real story [of]…how the nation's conservative party fostered the great fiscal breakdown now upon the land, and got away with it.”
The author laments the failure of officials to permit the financial collapse of 2008 to run its course. “Had this attack been allowed,” he writes, “hundreds of billions in long-term debt and equity capital that underpinned the Wall Street–based speculation machines would have been wiped out.” It also would have “implanted an abiding 1930s style generational lesson about the deadly dangers of leveraged speculation.” The author insists that such an outcome would have been “a good thing” as well as “profoundly therapeutic,” but Stockman fails to offer convincing refutation of the argument that things would have gotten out of control. He chastises Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson and others as agents for Wall Street's financial power, but the author's narrow focus on finance does not adequately address the real threat of a plunge into a depression worse than that of the 1930s. However, Stockman performs a real service when he debunks the myths that have been associated with Reagan's conservatism and promotes Eisenhower's fiscal and military conservatism. Two such myths, which provide the framework for this massive work, are specifically highlighted. First is his analysis of “where the Reagan Revolution's fiscal math hit the shoals,” leaving a legacy of permanent “massive deficit finance” and the legend that “deficits didn't matter.” Second, he traces the roots of perennial deficits back to Roosevelt's decision to take the country off the gold standard in 1933 and Nixon's ending of the dollar-to-gold convertibility in 1971.
Stockman forcefully conveys enormous amounts of knowledge, but some assertions will be found to be contentious.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-58648-912-0
Page Count: 784
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
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
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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