Read it for its reporting, not its insights—which are few.
D’Souza (Ronald Reagan, 1997, etc.) tells us what’s right, and what’s wrong, with our brave, new, prosperous world.
Folks are getting rich quick everywhere, thanks to a booming stock market and dross-to-gold Internet start-ups. And while America has always been rich, this rich is a new kind of rich—marked in part by the young super-rich, like 20-year-old Yale undergrad Joshua Newman, who runs a $6 million venture-capital fund. But the wealthy, D’Souza argues, are mired in moral quandaries: how did I get so lucky? Do I deserve these riches? The new wealth has done more than make a few millionaires feel guilty; it has also produced a larger critique of society. The stock-market boom and rampant consumer capitalism, say critics, are destroying American values—destroying the environment, tampering with religion, widening the gap between rich and poor. One-time ideological foes, like leftist Studs Terkel and conservative Gertrude Himmelfarb, can meet and agree on this much: our bank accounts are richer, but our society is poorer. And there’s another critique, less articulate, but no less heartfelt: the ones “left behind,” the Hollywood waitresses who aren’t making it on the silver screen, the college geeks who aren’t founding the next big Web site, are outraged and self-righteous. Why do they have to flip burgers while Julia Roberts suns at her pool? But capitalism is not all bad, D’Souza says, because even those waitresses who aren’t making millions still lead a pretty good life. They drive nice cars and have wide-screen TVs. Will these “consolation prize[s] . . . appease” them? D’Souza thinks not: the lower-middle classes won’t rise up in armed rebellion; they will sink into despair. His thesis is richly illustrated with fascinating anecdotes, but the yarns D’Souza tells fail to offer much in the way of prognosis, lending an unfinished quality to his overall portrait.
Read it for its reporting, not its insights—which are few.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86814-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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