A hard-hitting indictment of the data underpinning federal economic policies.
Americans are underemployed, broke, and desperate far beyond what federal statistics suggest, according to Ludwig’s searching economic manifesto.
The author, who served as the comptroller of the currency in the U.S. Department of the Treasury during the Clinton administration and, in 2019, founded the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, argues that measurements of unemployment, wages, and inflation understate the economic distress of middle- and working-class Americans. In this book, he proposes alternative metrics that, he says, paint a much clearer picture. He starts with the headline unemployment rate, called U-3, which excludes part-time workers seeking full-time employment and those earning less than poverty-line wages. Adding them, he asserts, would give a “True Rate of Unemployment”—people seeking full-time jobs with decent pay—of roughly 25 percent. Ludwig also criticizes the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ median weekly wage measurement, which doesn’t count unemployed workers or part-time employees; a True Weekly Earnings metric, he says, would peg median annual earnings at $9,778 less than the BLS numbers, he calculates. He goes on to condemn the Consumer Price Index for understating inflation for low-income Americans who spend most of their money on food, housing, and healthcare; these prices have climbed 35 percent faster than the CPI, according to his True Living Cost metric. These new measurements, the author argues, make clear that inequality has skyrocketed. In lucid, down-to-earth prose, Ludwig distills complex economic and statistical issues into easily digestible reasoning, illustrated with arresting examples of odd statistical assumptions that ignore kitchen-table realities; in CPI calculations, he notes insightfully, “the price for a second home has more weight than the prices charged for bread, pork, eggs, milk, chicken, and potatoes combined.” His writing takes on a sharp moral edge when he evokes the social repercussions of poverty and hopelessness in working-class America: “there are rows of unpainted, and in some cases burnt-out, row houses in once-thriving places like Baltimore, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Detroit—places where the American dream seemed plausible not long ago.” The result is an incisive, illuminating critique of the statistics of economic orthodoxy.
A hard-hitting indictment of the data underpinning federal economic policies.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781633311343
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Disruption Books
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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