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
PERSPECTIVES
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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