Eminently accessible, with a clearly liberal (or at least anticonservative) bent, but with surprises along the way—for one,...
Think the market is rational and that business knows best? Ha-Joon Chang (Economics/Univ. of Cambridge; Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, 2007, etc.) argues otherwise.
The author takes clear delight in pricking holes in a variety of received-wisdom balloons, most of them emanating from rightward-tending theorists. Take the idea, for example, that the government cannot pick a winner in the marketplace, which is why the TARP bailout and the takeover of General Motors sat so poorly with so many business types. Wrong, says Ha-Joon Chang (and the success of both efforts would seem to bear him out): Governments are obviously capable of picking winners, but the hard part is getting them to improve their averages, just as is true of private enterprise (for which he cites the dreaded example of Microsoft Vista). “The free market doesn’t exist,” he writes, shaking Economics 101 assumptions to the core. Instead, all markets are restricted by rules and regulations, and necessarily so, while governments are always involved in the market. Wages, the hallmark distinction between rich and poor nations, are politically more than economically determined. “So, when free-market economists say that a certain regulation should not be introduced because it would restrict the ‘freedom’ of a certain market,” writes the author, “they are merely expressing a political opinion that they reject the rights that are to be defended by the proposed law.” Those rights are mostly those of workers, but the author, an equal-opportunity iconoclast, also insists that in rich countries, most people are paid more than they’re worth. Only immigration controls keep the labor market from being flooded by workers from poor countries, who will accept lower rates of pay.
Eminently accessible, with a clearly liberal (or at least anticonservative) bent, but with surprises along the way—for one, the thought that markets need to become less rather than more efficient.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60819-166-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A well-argued study by one of the left’s more subtle and nonsectarian thinkers (The Death and Birth of American Radicalism, not reviewed, etc.). Aronowitz (Sociology/City University of New York) makes his viewpoint clear early in the work when he states that “the labor movement remains the best hope for democracy.” This makes of his book more an analysis of the political present and future of America than merely a narrow study of unions. He contends that a reinvigorated labor movement would have the potential to counteract the (in his view) hegemonic power of corporations in the US and the unresponsiveness of government to the needs of most people. He is not naive, however; he points out that union membership has dropped from over 40 percent of the private labor force in the late 1940s to under 10 percent today. Still, he sees hopeful signs as well: the successful 1997 UPS strike, the emergence of an activist leadership in the AFL-CIO. But labor must do much if it is to claim a place of leadership. It must break free from its dependence on the Democratic party and the liberal state, and stake out its own political space and ideology. It must be more adversarial and less accommodating to corporate power. It must move beyond the narrow confines of a shrinking industrial base and recruit membership from four crucial sectors: the South, the working poor, professional and technical employees, and low-paid white-collar workers. It must align itself with other progressive social movements. Finally, it must present a vision of America that inspires, that challenges the dominant mood of atomistic individualism and fatalism in which, he says in a nice turn of phrase, “the lotto winner is everyman.” Aronowitz handles all of this with his usual intellectual acuity and fluid writing. Aronowitz goes against the grain of much recent thinking. If for no other reason, this is a book to read and consider.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1998
ISBN: 0-395-88132-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
You’ll never again take the produce on your supermarket shelf for granted after reading this illuminating account. At this point, the incredible shrinking paycheck has become a fact of the American worker’s life. Just how little progress some of America’s most disenfranchised have made since Civil War days, however, comes poignantly clear in this ably written chronicle of the 700,000 migrant workers who sometimes literally kill themselves to bring food to our tables. The book is comprised of real people talking, interspersed with Rothenberg’s statistics and analysis. Although the author might have attacked his topic with an agenda—he was an outreach worker and paralegal for a federally funded legal-services program that represented farmworkers—he instead lets both sides speak. All concerned are remarkably candid, even those who regularly break the law. (Pseudonyms are used.) Contractors, for instance, speak of luring employees to work with drugs, loaning money at inflated rates of interest, and witholding tax and Social Security payments. “Breaking the law is the only way you can make decent money,” says Manuel Gomez, a contractor who finds workers for California growers. He records only some of his workers’ hours and pay on the computer, then pockets the money he might otherwise have paid in Social Security or taxes. “The truth is the worker hardly notices,” he concludes, noting most of them are illegal aliens. “They don’t even use real Social Security numbers, so we’re not stealing from the workers. We’re just stealing from the government. I don’t see it as all that bad.” Altogether, Rothenberg interviews more than 250 people, including workers and their families, border patrolmen, political lobbyists, union organizers, coyotes who smuggle workers across the border, doctors who care for farmworkers, and growers. A fascinating portrait of an invisible class and an evocative mandate for social change. (34 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-100205-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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