A stimulating brief for an energetic, expansionary economic policy that puts money in people’s pockets.
With automation and artificial intelligence poised to eliminate much human labor, the economy will need recurring handouts of cash to survive, according to this daring economic manifesto.
Everyone is worried about the specter of mass unemployment threatened by technology like AI and robotics; Soards explores the dire macroeconomic effects of that potentiality. Technological “magic oranges,” he writes, will reduce costs of products in many sectors—and jobs and wages as well. The result is a “buyer’s market,” he asserts, with rising automated production capacity combined with falling wages and employment. Declining incomes, the author argues, will then erode consumer demand for goods and services, causing economic production to fall—which will lead to still more unemployment and even lower demand. The socioeconomic implications, he warns, are disastrous: a slumping economy, rising poverty, joblessness and inequality, political unrest, and declining marriage and birth rates because young couples can’t earn enough to buy homes and start families. The remedy for all of this is what Soards calls an “Automation Annuity” by way of “Progress Dollars,” which are monthly cash handouts to all adult citizens, digitally created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve and distributed by the Social Security system. The Automation Annuity would raise workers’ incomes, shield them from insecurity, boost consumer spending and production, and generally keep capitalism humming along. Later sections of the book cover a miscellany of other reforms, including an end to Federal Reserve targeting of interest rates, strict campaign finance rules, raising congressional salaries to $2 million (so lawmakers won’t be tempted by bribes), and abolishing the American Medical Association’s power to restrict the number of medical-school programs and graduates.
Soards’ program brings together several strands of economic thinking, including a Keynesian take on the centrality of demand to the economy and the need for government stimulus; modern monetary theorists’ case for printing money as a better method of state finance than borrowing; and progressives’ enthusiasm for a universal basic income that guarantees a decent standard of living for all. His proposals may seem ill-timed for the current moment of low unemployment and the lingering dread of inflation ignited by the Fed’s printing of money, but they are very relevant to a plausible near future in which AI has trashed labor markets and started a deflationary spiral, as many experts forecast. Soards conveys his arguments in lucid, accessible, down-to-earth prose with a lively, populist edge. (“The root of the problem lies in a simple question: ‘Who do these corporations think is going to buy their stuff after they lay us all off?’”) The author buttresses his case with a wealth of revealing statistics that suggest that the buyer’s market has been with us for several decades of stagnant wages and downward mobility, along with graphs that give a pithy visual summation of his analysis. (His inverted “production parabola” shows the economy sliding inexorably rightward down a steepening slope of collapse.) Readers anxious about the brave new world of AI—and who isn’t?—will find here a hopeful and practical plan for dealing with its economic fallout.
A stimulating brief for an energetic, expansionary economic policy that puts money in people’s pockets.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781959623601
Page Count: 72
Publisher: Booklocker
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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
Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts.
But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill.
But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1979
ISBN: 0312427565
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
